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.
SAS IT Resource Management
has identified important measures for adapters for which aggregation
tables are provided. 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 has 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_3.3/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.