> > My boss was asked to come up with metrics by which to measure how
> > much/well his team is working.
Critical question: are you trying to measure how well *the team* is
working, or how well/what individual members of the team are doing?
I hope it is the team results that are being measured....
> You want to get the metric as close as possible to the job you want your
> team actually doing; For a team of SysAdmins, I think measuring uptime
> (not uptime(1) - measuring the availability of the servers or services
> the SysAdmins support) might be the best thing to do,
> if you can do that in a way that encourages your sysadmins to
> push for more reliable systems/gear.
I think Luke is on the right track here: if you don't already know
(i.e., don't have a Service Level Agreement with your customers), ask
you boss how your group is evaluated by the customers, what their
priorites are, what their operational requirements are, and find ways to
measure those. Service availability is probably high on their list.
Once you identify the goals/requirements, and start to measure, you
might find things you can improve.
I don't know if this will help or hurt, but, here's an idea. If "service
availability" is the primary metric, for sure measure that (as seen by
the end users). And then monitor/measure the components of service
availability -- you might find unexpected bottlenecks that can be fixed.
Here's an entirely made-up situation: you have a monitoring system that
reports disk failures within 10 seconds, and tickets are assigned within
1 minute (just making these number up, remember), but you discover that
the person who is authorized to approve using a replacement disk only
works afternoons. So all failures except in the afternoon have delays of
several hours. Now you have identified a problem directly related to the
customers' primary concern, and you can find ways to fix it.
Much more productive than measuring microseconds to ticket closure :)
--david
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