Understanding the importance and limitations of KPIs
Because of the problem of scale and the desire to make some amount of progress in making the collected data actionable, it is natural that some of the first metrics to be tackled for active inspection are those that are the best indicators of performance or operation. The KPIs that an IT organization chooses for measurement, tracking, and flagging can span diverse indicators, including the following:
- Customer experience: These metrics measure customer experience, such as application response times or error rates.
- Availability: Metrics such as uptime or Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) are often important to track.
- Business: Here we may have metrics that directly measure business performance, such as orders per minute or number of active users.
As such, these types of metrics are usually displayed, front and center, on most high-level operational dashboards or on staff reports for employees ranging from technicians...