What Are Key Metrics?

Key metrics are a subset of the available metrics provided by adapters for the server 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 Aggregation in a Process Flow Diagram

SAS IT Resource Management identified important measures for adapters for which it provides aggregation tables. Typically, these measures can be found in the key metrics aggregation tables for various domain categories within an adapter. Often these measures can also be found in other summarized aggregation tables. In that case, they can have a corresponding rank measure that can be used for reporting on the top or bottom resources for the specific measure.

In addition to identifying these important measures, SAS IT Resource Management selected common labels for these measures when they represent the same activity across adapters. When you design a user-written adapter, you should use these common labels, if your data represent a similar measurement.

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.

Note: The measurements in a key metrics aggregation are considered key metrics and they are not ranked. However, these same individual measurements can be included in aggregations that are not key metrics aggregations. When a measurement is in a regular summarized aggregation, it can be ranked. If it is ranked, the measurement is considered a ranked metric (not a key metric) in the context of the regular summarized aggregation table.

This appendix provides information about the key metrics that are provided by SAS IT Resource Management adapters. To find other key metrics that are not listed in this appendix, see http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/itsv/zipfiles/HTMLDoc_3.7/DataModel.html. This section of the SAS IT Resource Management web page contains detailed information about all of the metrics that are provided by adapters for staged and aggregation tables.