A Practical Introduction to Incident Management Metrics

Tracking your incident management metrics is necessary for any intended optimizations within your organization. Whether your team is looking to align with the company’s business goals, to benchmark and elevate performance, to increase customer satisfaction, or more, scrutinizing these metrics is the way to go. 

We recommend that you start by defining your why, which can translate into a quantitative goal of achieving a 99.99% uptime or a qualitative goal of understanding the main challenges keeping your team from reaching a 99.99% uptime. 

Once you have a clear understanding of your specific goals, the next step is to choose which metrics you need to focus on. This will allow for a continuous monitoring of these goals and for building a robust operational framework.

Incident Management Metrics Categories

In this blog, we have summarized the key incident management metrics into four main categories to help you choose the most relevant metrics:

• Operational performance metrics describe the availability and the performance of the service. Reflecting how well the service meets the expectations of the users, this includes Uptime, Latency, and Performance. 
• Stability metrics indicate the reliability and stability of the system. Relevant metrics include Change Failure Rate (CFR) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
• On-call metrics measure the responsiveness and the efficacy of the incident management process. This includes Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Incident Response Time.
• Throughput metrics indicate the workflow efficiency and the change pace of the deployment pipeline. Examples of metrics include Lead Time for Changes and Deployment Frequency.

The Top 10 Incident Management Metrics

Taking a closer look at these categories, we recommend that you prioritize the following top ten metrics: 

• Uptime: An essential metric quantifying the duration a system stays functional, typically shown as a percentage of the maximum feasible operating time within a defined interval such as a yearly or monthly period.
• Change Failure Rate (CFR): A metric which measures the percentage of changes that result in a failure. Formula: CFR = (Failed Deployments / Total Deployments)
• Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): This metric calculates the average time it takes to recover from a failure, a lower MTTR indicates higher operational efficiency.
• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): This is the average time it takes for an incident to be acknowledged post-reporting, which indicates the alertness and readiness of the team.
• Average Incident Response Time: The elapsed time from when an incident is reported to when it's routed to the right team member, including the time to acknowledge and the initial response time.
• On-call Time: Measuring the time spent on-call helps the on-call teams to balance workload and prevent burnout.
• Lead Time for Changes: The duration from when a change is committed to when it’s live in production, which indicates how efficient is the deployment process.
• Deployment Frequency: The number of deployments to production over a certain period of time. A higher frequency of smaller, more manageable deployments is often indicative of a mature deployment process.
• Number of Incidents: Tracking the number of incidents over a period of time can uncover trends and patterns, which allows proactive incident management.
• Number of Alerts: Measuring the count of alerts aids in minimizing false positives and averting alert fatigue, which ensures that alerts stay meaningful and actionable. 

Performance Level Benchmarks

Now that you have a more granular understanding of these metrics and know which ones would be most relevant to your specific case, you might need to examine performance level benchmarks to assess how well your metrics are performing. The following table provides some guidelines:

As you develop your metric-driven approach to monitoring your incident management process, you will gain practical insights and uncover relevant trends within your data. These insights can be leveraged to make informed decisions and necessary improvements allowing you to reach operational excellence and ensure high end customer satisfaction.

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Curious to read more? Check our Incident Management Metrics Guide here.