Objective

For all sizes of businesses, private and public organizations, educational institutions, consumers and the individuals working within these organizations, IT service s have become an integral means for conducting business. Without IT services many organizations would not be able to deliver the products and services in today’s market. As reliance on these IT services increase so do the expectations for availability, reliability and stability. This is why having the business and IT integrated is so important. No longer can they be thought of separately. The same holds true when measuring IT services. It is no longer sufficient to measure and report against the performance of an individual component such as a server or application. IT must now be able to measure and report against an end-to-end service.

For services there are three basic measurements that most organizations utilize. The Service Design publication covers these measures in more detail.

• Availability of the service
• Reliability of the service
• Performance of the service

In many cases when an organization is monitoring, measuring and reporting on component levels they are doing so to protect themselves and possibly to point the blame elsewhere —‘My server or my application was up 100% of the time.’ Service measurement is not about placing blame or protecting oneself but is really about providing a meaningful view of the IT service as the customer experiences the service. The server may be up, but because the network is down, the customer is not able to connect to the server. Therefore the IT service was not available even though one or more of the components used to provide the service was available the whole time. Being able to measure against a service is directly linked to the components, system s and applications that are being monitored and reported on.

Measuring at the component level is necessary and valuable, but service measurement must go further than the component level. Service measurement will require someone to take the individual measurements and combine them to provide a view of the true customer experience. Too often we provide a report against a component, system or application but don’t provide the true service level as experienced by the customer. Figure 4.10 shows how it is possible to measure and report against different levels of systems and components to provide a true service measurement. Even though the figure references availability measuring and reporting the same can apply for performance measuring and reporting.

Figure 4.10 Availability reporting

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02