IT Business Metric Analysis

Perhaps the ultimate form of efficiency measurement is the assessment of the infrastructure's ability to service the needs of the business services and applications it supports. CiRBA enables analysis of both business- and infrastructure-centric views.

Aggregated Views Across Business Lines

A fundamental building block in the attainment of business-centric views of IT is the aggregation of IT metrics across business lines. CiRBA enables the resources allocated to, and used by a particular business function to be accounted for, providing increased transparency, and more advanced financial modeling, and cross-charging. CiRBA enables aggregate resource utilization analysis across business and logical lines, including the following:

• Aggregate CPU utilization by application
• Storage footprint by business service
• Memory use by application type
• Power consumption by application

Efficiency Measuring Leveraging Business Metric Analysis

Business metrics or service management statistics can be aggregated and correlated against infrastructure-related metrics to achieve various measures of efficiency. These include measurement of the operational efficiency of infrastructure in servicing business transactions, the correlation of outages and availability data against various aspects of IT infrastructure, and analysis of saturation points that can limit the infrastructure’s ability to service business activity.

CiRBA can support the following:

• Aggregating business data, including transaction rates, concurrent users, response times, availability, and outage windows
• Transactional efficiency measurements, including cycles per transaction and infrastructure cost per transaction rate (“compute-capital ratio”)
• Business-metric correlation, such as What-if analysis of infrastructure loads incurred by business activity increases or decreases for application consolidation analysis or M&A analysis

IT Performance Scorecarding

Once the computation of detailed metrics has been established, the next rung in the maturity ladder is to assess these metrics against overall goals. This, of course, requires goals to be set, and in many environments the ability to gain visibility into different aspects of efficiency and performance is a useful catalyst to cause this to happen. CiRBA enables the tracking of the following:

• Service availability
• Transactional efficiency
• Overall infrastructure efficiency