What Are Key Metrics?

Key metrics are a subset of the available metrics provided by adapters for a given performance area such as resource utilization. SAS IT Resource Management identifies key metrics because monitoring hundreds of available metrics within and across adapters is not effective. You can use key metrics to quickly view the most critical data for a performance area. You can also collect key metrics over a long period of time to create capacity planning and forecasting plans.

Key metrics are standardized across adapters, enabling metrics from various data sources to be identified and compared appropriately. SAS IT Resource Management supports the collection of these performance measurements in the IT data mart by staging and aggregating key metrics via adapter domain categories in the Adapter Setup wizard.

The Adapter Setup wizard creates key metric aggregations and regular aggregations for the specific domain categories that you choose for a given adapter. Key metrics aggregations are named with a prefix of “KeyMetrics.” The following image shows a key metrics aggregation, circled in red, in a process flow diagram.

Key metrics aggregations are designed to be narrow tables that serve as the source for capacity planning and forecasting. Key metrics aggregations include only key metrics and any relevant classification and ID columns that are associated with these key metrics to provide vital data for the performance metric.

This appendix provides information about the key metrics that are provided by SAS IT Resource Management adapters. For more information about all the aggregation metrics that are provided by SAS IT Resource Management adapters, see the documentation at http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/itsv/metrics.html.