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KPI (Key Performance Indicator) reports are reports that summarize complex information based on data collected by PerformanceGuard agents.

Health KPI Report—Fixed Business Hours is one such report. The report is intended for IT service delivery reporting to C-level managers (that is top-level managers with "Chief ..." titles, such as CEOs, CFOs and CTOs). The report provides a summarized quality assessment of the complete IT service delivery. The term Fixed Business Hours refers to the report's monitoring interval.

The report is available under REPORTING > Reports.

In the following we will look at how KPIs are calculated and how PerformanceGuard administrators can change the report's parameters. If you would simply like to view the report and understand its content, see View Health KPI Report.

Event and Alert Rules Determine System Health

A series of KPI-related event and alert rules, defined in the PerformanceGuard event management section, control exactly when the system is considered to be healthy.

Every day PerformanceGuard will calculate and store KPI values for all locations using the KPI-related event and alert rules that apply at the time of calculation. Consequently, if you change KPI-related event and alert rules, your changes will only have effect from the time of the change and onwards.

To understand how event and alert rules determine system health in a KPI context, try to go through the following steps:

The steps are based on the default event management setup in PerformanceGuard. Note that the event management setup may have been changed in your organization.

Select ADMINISTRATION > Event Management > Event Categories. Notice that there are a number of KPI-related event categories, for example Desktop KPI.
Then select ADMINISTRATION > Event Management > Event Rules and click the Edit icon next to an event rule. Notice that some of the event rules belong in the KPI-related event categories. For example, the event rule Process CPU Usage (that specifies that an event should occur if process CPU usage exceeds a certain limit) belongs in the Desktop KPI event category.
When such KPI-related events occur they will trigger alerts. If you select ADMINISTRATION > Event Management > Alert Categories you'll notice that there is a Health KPI alert category.
Now select ADMINISTRATION > Event Management > Alert Rules and click the Edit icon next to an alert rule. Notice that some of the alert rules belong in the Health KPI alert category. For example, the alert rule Desktop belongs in that alert category.

Let's look more closely at the Desktop alert rule. It will trigger an alert based on the following criteria:

- A event of the event category Desktop KPI must have occurred
- The occurred event must at least be of the severity Warning
- The event can have occurred at any location
- The event must have occurred on at least one computer

When the criteria are met, the alert rule will trigger an alert of the severity Warning. Now look at the alert rule's last setting, the Alert Period:

By default the alert period is set to 3 minutes. This means that if the alert is triggered, the system is considered to have been unhealthy for three minutes. If the alert is triggered during the KPI report's monitoring interval, the three-minute unhealthy period will directly affect the KPI calculation.

Example: If the report is set up to look at the system health during eight-hour (480-minute) working days, and the alert is triggered once during a working day, the system will have been unhealthy for 3 out of the working day's 480 minutes. That may not seem like much, but say that a similar alert is triggered at your location forty times during the working day: In that case the system will have been unhealthy for 40×3=120 out of the day's 480 minutes, that is 25% of the time. That in turn means that the system will only have been healthy for 75% of the time during that day, and that could be a problem if the minimum required KPI value is 95.

Change Minimum Required KPI Value

In the PerformanceGuard web interface, select ADMINISTRATION > Reporting > KPI items.
Click the Edit icon next to the Health KPI - Fixed Business Hours report.
Under Set New Minimum Required KPI Value, specify the date that you want the new minimum value to be effective from. Then specify the new minimum value, and click the Set button.

In the table at the bottom of the page, note how your new minimum value is associated with its date. The table thus lets you view what the minimum values have been over time.

Change Period Covered by Report

In the PerformanceGuard web interface, select ADMINISTRATION > Reporting > Report.
Click the Edit icon next to the Health KPI - Fixed Business Hours report.
Under Default Report Parameters, select the required period in the Interval menu.
Click the Update button.

Note that even though the report period covers, for example, a week, KPI calculation may only be based on certain parts of that week, for example working hours. This is determined by the monitoring interval (see the following).

Change Monitoring Interval

Only system activity within the monitoring interval is used when calculating the KPI value for the report period. This means that a report can, for example, cover a week while KPI calculation is only based upon activity during the working hours of that week.

In the PerformanceGuard web interface, select ADMINISTRATION > Reporting > KPI Items.
Click the Edit icon next to the Health KPI - Fixed Business Hours report.
In the Monitoring Interval menu, select required interval.
The available intervals don't suit our needs. What do we do?
You can set up your own intervals under ADMINISTRATION > Reporting > Periods. See also Periods.
Click Save.

Change Long Period

The report's summary and graph sections will—when data is available—also show data from a period that's longer than the report period. When such data is available, it lets you compare data from the two periods. You can change the length of the long period:

In the PerformanceGuard web interface, select ADMINISTRATION > Reporting > KPI items.
Click the Edit icon next to the Health KPI - Fixed Business Hours report.
In the Long Period field, specify required number of days. The number must be higher than the number of days covered by the report period.
Click Save.

How Is the KPI Trend Calculated?

The KPI trend is calculated as a linear trend based on the daily KPI values within the trend period. The resulting trend thus shows the slope of the linear trend (that is whether the linear trend is going up or down) in percentage points per day:

Very positive: Slope is greater than or equal to 1.0 percentage point
Positive: Slope is between 0.25 and 1.0 percentage point
Stable: Slope is between -0.25 and 0.25 percentage point
Negative: Slope is between -1.0 and -0.25 percentage point
Very negative: Slope is worse than -1.0 percentage point

At least two days of KPI measurement is required in order to show a trend for the period covered by the report.

The report also shows a trend for a period that's longer than the report period (the long period; see the previous). Note that until KPI data has been collected for a sufficient amount of time, the long period trend will mirror the period trend.

How Is the KPI Assessment Calculated?

The KPI assessment (represented by smileys in the report) is based on three things:

The calculated KPI value
The minimum required KPI value
The calculated trend for the KPI value

When PerformanceGuard compares the calculated KPI value with the minimum required KPI value, it will find that the calculated KPI value is either above, equal to, or below the minimum required KPI value. The calculated KPI value is equal to the minimum required KPI value if the following requirement is met:

Minimum required KPI value ≤ calculated KPI value < minimum required KPI value + delta KPI

Delta KPI is by default set to 1, but you can change it in the PerformanceGuard database and thus control how much calculated KPI value change it will require to change the assessment.

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