Metrics

When you report on a table (for example, Incident or Problem), information about the current state of platform data displays

A metric is used to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of IT service management processes

• Metrics measures data over time to show past history
• Metrics can gather data as the data is updated

System tables are, by default, restricted from the reporting module. These tables include, but are not limited to the following: syslog, syslog_transaction, sys_attachment, and sys_email.

Compared to reports, metrics are used to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of IT service management processes. A metric could measure the effectiveness of the incident resolution process by calculating how long it takes to resolve an incident.

Sometimes a metric can be easily obtained from the data. For example, to find the number of incidents that were created today, a report will count the number of incident records in the Incident table with a created date of today. Other times, metrics need to be gathered as data is updated. For example, determining how long an incident was assigned to a certain group requires collecting information about assignment changes and calculating the duration of each assignment.

The Metric Definition plugin provides a declarative way of defining metrics, and, once defined, the data for the metric is gathered, and occurrences of the metric are calculated and stored.