and are adequately controlled to ensure valid, reliable, timely, and secure input, processing, and output at all levels of a system’s activity.

What’s in it for me?

• A controlled environment in which it’s clear which users and user groups use objects and reports.
• Root cause analysis to easily relate the disruption of a service to changes and users.
• Which reports are used and which reports are ‘dead’.
• It enables efficient license usage. Why pay for want you do not use?

The audit should answer the following questions:

1. Who is using your reporting solution?
2. Which groups use your reporting solution the most?
3. Which objects they are accessing?
4. Which reports are they using?
5. How many user licenses are we using at any given time?

You can audit the actions of individual users of Business Objects Enterprise as they log in and out of the system, access data, or create file-based events. You can also monitor system actions like the success or failure of scheduled objects. For each action, Business Objects Enterprise records the time of the action, the name and user group of the user who initiated the action, the server where it was performed, and a variety of other parameters available in the documentation with Business Objects.

The auditable actions I like the most are:

• Track when Objects are created, deleted of modified;
• Track when reports are opened, saved, refreshed, created, modified and deleted;
• Job monitoring and failure;
• Changes and history in login behaviour of users and groups;
• Monitoring of license usage.

A post last year on the Chennai Bi blog gives some useful guidelines on how to implement auditing: http://chennaibi.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/business-objects-auditing-in-xir3/

Martijn

The purpose of measuring blood sugar levels is twofold. First and foremost, it is meant to prevent a situation in which high or low blood glucose levels may cause severe symptoms that need to be treated right away. Depending on the glucose reading, a patient must take corrective measures to get the blood glucose levels up to par. Second, checking blood glucose will help a patient place fluctuating blood glucose levels in their correct context. High or low glucose levels may not appear from out-of-the-blue. Analyzing the context of a blood glucose measurement will help a patient learn how aspects such as insulin injections, food, activity levels and stress impact their blood sugar levels.

So where’s the link to IT Service Management? Monitoring a service desk serves two purposes that are indeed quite similar to the reasons for measuring blood sugar levels.  First, it enables service desk managers to take corrective measures in order to prevent undesirable situations from occurring. Second, it helps managers understand the context of the metrics that are retrieved.

Consider, for example, a scenario in which your daily monitor indicates that a business-critical workgroup is assigned an unusually high number of calls. This may have dire consequences; the number of calls past deadline may increase, SLAs may not be met and customer satisfaction may decrease. Detecting this trend, the service desk manager can now ensure that calls are assigned to other workgroups or request additional staffing to help deal with the workgroup’s unusual workload.

Moreover, as Susan Sanderson  correctly observes in her book “Introduction to Help Desk Concepts and Skills”, metrics must be evaluated in context since variation from standard levels can be the result of a wide range of factors. Analyzing the reasons behind the increasing pressure on the aforementioned workgroup may lead the service desk manager to conclude that the higher number of assigned calls is the direct consequence of a Change implemented in the organization’s network infrastructure the previous day. Rather than requesting additional staffing as a permanent measure, more staff may only be required for resolving the issues resulting from the Change.

How will monitoring your service desk help you in your daily endeavors? What daily metrics do you want to obtain? Consider these questions and share your ideas with us by posting a comment.

Get started with monitoring your service desk using Westbury’s  Service Desk Monitor. Westbury’s Service Desk Monitor is a lightweight application for retrieving daily metrics from your service desk environment and distributing these metrics to a wide range of audiences via RSS. Interested? Leave an ‘I am interested’ comment and I’ll contact you.