Infrastructure KPIs

[CunningClaire]

Hi

I work at a University and manage the computing service SLAs. I'm wanting to develop useful KPIs to measure our infrastructure services - these include the network (wired and wireless), data centre management, file storage etc. Does anyone have any examples of meaningful KPIs? Thanks.

[UKVIKING]

Number of silly questions raised per month
Number of silly answers posted per month
Number of total posts by person
number of posts per month in a specific thread

The KPIs that you create for the services that you manage should reflect what you are concerned about - service wise.

Each service will have a set of KPIs.
Each service will have a SLA that explains the service
The SLA will use have KPIs and other metrics in it to determine how well the service is doing or not
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[CunningClaire]

Thanks for your response there. Really useful. Glad you took the time to type that out.

Anyone else fancy being actually helpful? I have read the books so I do know what an SLA is and a KPI. I also understand that we should have KPIs that measure what we want to know - but it doesn't hurt to see what others have done.

What I was asking for was any real life examples of useful infrastructure KPIs - or any helpful experience of them. For example, measures of availability rather than uptime, MTBF etc. I'm interested in ones that cover large organisations/areas as we have a large campus.

[UKVIKING]

CunningClaire

You are quite welcome concerning my reply.

As no one here works at your university or knows what services that you provide - how are any of us able to provide any usefull examples of KPIs / metrics for your organization / services

What others have done is exactly what I have said

You write the KPis/Metrics based on the services you provide

The Service Defintion and Agreement would give you a good idea as to what KPIs / metrics

The books - the ITIL books - have excellent examples of KPIs
As does the books / documents for CoBIT... and the addenda ITIL mapping to CoBIT... which are pretty good for defining general services.

The issue of using KPIs is the purpose of KPIs being used.

You can have 100s of KPIs/ metrics that are tracked, recorded and reported and ignored.

You should have ones that MEAN something to your organisation or teams
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[CunningClaire]

What I was after was examples to facilitate discussion here. I am not wanting anyone to write them for me. You have been clear that you do not have these so I'll see if anyone else is willing to help. Thanks.

[UKVIKING]

CunningClaire

KPIs and metrics are context oriented

For network changes, the KPI/ metrics are geared around the network

For example
Volume of traffic
Volume of HTTP Traffic
Hits on Web Sites
network device stats - usage,memory, peak, b/w etc
For system
Memory
CPU Usage
SAN usage
Number of users.

It all depends on what you want to measure and why

There are literally thousands of examples that could be presented

But.. why give you examples that are not even related to what you are needing

So.. what services does your organization provide and how

The only KPIs that are common are ticket KPIs and metrics

# of tickets per period
# of High, medium, low priority per period
# of <service> tickets per period
Average ticket duration
Mean time of ticket duration
# of tickets that fail SLAs

So, you can have volume, percentage of ticket based on the characteristics of the ticket system - by user, by resolution team, by update time, by classification - urgency, priority, impact, by Configuration Item.

The list is endless

Then what you have to decide is what is the purpose of the statistics taken ? and what does increases / decreases in the number mean and what actions do you take or not take

Giving you a list of some or all of the potential KPIs or metrics is pointless.

You need to look at why you want a specific KPI / metric and then determine how to get it - repetatively
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter