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When you have agreed on service levels with your customer, you will be expected to report your performance. To help with the reporting process it is vital that every support engineer diligently logs all activities. Only if every action on incidents, changes, problems, configuration items, and any other information in your helpdesk system is always logged right away can you hope to be able to provide detailed reports and actively monitor your performance against SLA levels. Support engineers are not always very happy to have to constantly log what they are doing, but it is important for you as a support engineer as well. When the service manager is aware of the amount of work being done and the areas where desired service levels cannot be met, he will be able to report to the company's management team and negotiate budgets for more tools or people. By consistently logging everything you do, you enable this process to function and thus help make sure that sufficient tools and people are available to help you provide prompt support to users.
There are different ways to manage reporting of the ICT performance. A few of the most common forms of monitoring and reporting are listed below.
One of the primary targets that are found in a typical Service Level Agreement is the time needed to solve issue types. You will normally find tables for every issue type which list the target solution time and the percentage of issues to be solved in that time. For instance, the following table is an example for a table with Incident solution time targets:
| Priority | Target Solution Time | Percentage to be solved within target time. |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 4 hours | 95% |
| High | 1 business day | 90% |
| Medium | 3 business days | 90% |
| Low | 1 week | 80% |
This should be monitored on a daily basis for capacity planning and to make sure no Incidents (or other issue types) get neglected. How this is reported back is dependent on policies, but often there will be monthly reports to customers with the result of these targets for the issues reported by users from the customer's organization.