Key Performance Indicators
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurement of a business activity that is important to the success of an organization. KPIs monitor metrics for quantitative business and system data, such as revenue, volume of orders, queue length, and cycle time. KPIs help answer questions such as the following:
How many orders over $10,000 have completed for this process?
What is the revenue for the Southeast Region?
What is the total available memory for the
Integration Server?
In an order management process, KPIs might monitor how many orders were received, their monetary amounts, and whether they were processed successfully.
To measure business or system data, a KPI specifies:
A metric, which includes the following:
A unit of measure (such as dollars or minutes).
A calculation, which determines how to aggregate the data.
A data collection interval.
Optimize supports nine KPI data collection intervals: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, and 8 hours.
Optimize supports five types of calculations.
The following table describes the calculations types.
Calculation | Function |
Sum | Sums the data points collected over each collection interval. A possible use for this type of calculation is to tally process step errors. |
Delta | Calculates the difference between the last data point collected in the previous collection interval and the last data point collected in the current collection interval. A possible use for this type of calculation is to compare Broker document published counts. Note:
The delta calculation has been deprecated. It is supported in this release, but support will be discontinued in a future release. |
Average | Calculates the average value of the data collected over each collection interval. A possible use for this type of calculation is to track CPU usage. |
Last Value | Stores the value of the last data collected in the collection interval. A possible use for this type of calculation is to track the size of a queue. |
Max | Stores the maximum value of the data collected in the collection interval. |
Min | Stores the minimum value of the data collected in the collection interval. |
State | Stores the value of the last data collected in each collection interval, where the possible values are 1 (online) or 0 (offline). A possible use for this type of calculation is to track the state of an application. |
An intrinsic KPI is created by Optimize to monitor business process or system data. For example, Optimize creates KPIs to monitor Instance Count by Process, Cycle Time by Process, and Process Error Count. Optimize also creates KPIs to monitor each error condition. There are hundreds of possible error conditions. For example, if a Step Timeout error occurs, Optimize creates a Step Timeout Error KPI to monitor all occurrences of the error.
A business or system KPI enables you to monitor business process or system data. Most of the KPIs discussed in this chapter, such as Revenue by Customer or Integration Server Total Memory, are business or system KPIs.
A composite KPI performs a mathematical operation (add, subtract, multiply, or divide) on two other KPIs. For example, if individual KPIs monitor a product's operating costs and revenue, a composite KPI can monitor the product's profit by subtracting the operating cost KPI from the revenue KPI. Both of the individual KPIs must measure their data over the same collection interval (for example, one hour). The composite KPI has a calculation (sum, average, or last value) and a unit of measure.