The key concept of aligning metrics and KPI’s to business services has been a corner-stone of modern service delivery for many years.

However, when it comes to building individual reports, this concept is often left by the way-side. In many cases, this is because aligning information to business services is complex and difficult, especially when relying on a complex Configuration Management Database.

We’re going to walk through how breakthrough new Explore Analytics functionality enables you to easily take existing reports and align them to services.

Let’s start with a common report, tracking resolution time by priority:

We can tell some interesting information from this report; particularly, it seems like the time it takes to resolve incidents is going up over time, including some spikes in P1 incidents in Q4 2014 and Q4 2015. This is useful to understand how different priority incidents are being resolved, and give us a starting point to address this overall.

What we aren’t seeing in this picture, however, is whether critical services are improving or declining. The business may consider P1 incidents that impact critical services to be more important than low-criticality services. We want to take that into account as we understand this picture.

With just a few clicks, we’ll transform this report into a similar, but service-oriented, way of looking at the same information.

In order for a report to be service-oriented, we need to leverage the Configuration Items that these incidents are related to, and walk up the relationship to the parent business services.

The report is defined with:

• Category: Resolved by Quarter
• Secondary Category: Priority

To translate this to a service-oriented report, you can:

1. Change the Secondary Category to Configuration Item, and then click the pencil icon.
2. Change the label to Business Service Criticality, and click the Business Service button.
3. In the section of the Business Service popup that asks for Field Name, use the drop-down to select Business Criticality.
4.  If you’d still like to be able to compare Priority, you can click the Animation button and select Priority, and select Include “All”

Now, the report is by business service:

If you use the drop-down in the top-left to select Priority 1, you’ll see that the times that Priority 1 incidents spiked in resolution time, it was for lower criticality services — something you would not have known in the original report. The High Criticality services saw spikes in Low and Moderate priority incidents.

The steps above can be applied to any of the reports you may have already defined — consider adding an element (whether it’s the categorization or the animation) that brings in the names of services, or their criticality score, and you will add a service-oriented dimension to your visualization.

Give it a try and see what you can find out! For more information, visit our wiki on Business Service Reporting.