IT Performance Management and KPIs
Any IT company of significant size, it is important to know and measure the overall performance of IT operations and it is being measured through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It is done at the individual account level and cumulatively at the organizational level. Based on the overall matrix, you can know which Maturity Model Level a company belongs to.
Why we need IT Performance Management
The level of IT performance demonstrates the ability to present the value that IT services bring to the company’s bottom line. IT performance management is needed for business-IT alignment. IT performance management is needed for IT efficiency and effectiveness. The following are some of the advantages of IT Performance Measurement.
- Help to focus on the realization of financial and non-financial goals.
- Making the Performance Indicators (KPIs) visible across the business team or organization and finding ways to make it measurable on the required goals
- Will be able to create action-oriented reports based on KPIs
- Making the stakeholders aware of the performance at any point in time
- Encouraging a result-oriented culture in the organization
The Maturity Model Levels are classified as follows.
- Level 1: There are monitoring systems in place to measure the performance of the product in focus, but they do not give enough details to give a complete picture. When a problem occurs, you will see lot of red alerts or emails getting generated, which will help you to know something is wrong. Need an expert person to analyze and give more details on the problem.
- Level 2: At this level in-depth monitoring is happening. You can see the product team is using tools like Splunk, Kibaba for log analysis. AppDynamics or New Relic is being used for Application Performance Monitoring. So at this level, you are getting more in-depth information on the state of the system.
- Level 3 : At this level, along with the states and events that are already monitored, you also use additional data to indicate the impact on the whole system. So here you will be using additional data from the CI/CD pipelines (Jenkin, Puppet etc), tools like Jira for incidence data management.
- Level 4 : At this level, more operations are automated and intelligence is added to the system monitoring to achieve things like sending alerts before failure, abnormality detection, auto-scaling of application, self-heal services that are down etc.
Different ways to Measure KPIs
The following are some of the ways for collecting the KPIs
- Excel Templates that collect required matrix data and create dashboards.
- Tools like Domo, Klipfolio or custom HTML dashboards
Trends
More and more automation and adding intelligence to the whole process is happening. Advanced data collection from multiple sources and intelligent data analysis is being used along with the usage of AI. Some example are StackState, HP BTO, Zabbix, Logic Monitor.