Metrics vs Performance Analytics

[hm69]

Good day --

Could someone help describe some of the similarities and differences between Metrics and Performance Analytics?

I know that Metrics rely on Db Views and PA is driven by its own module with Indicator and Breakdown sources, but which one of these (Metrics or PA) do I use under what circumstances?

Any simple examples would be helpful.

Thank you.

[Michael Fry1]

Metrics capture things like Assignment group changes, or Assignment Group duration, or Assigned to duration.

PA takes you ticket history, for example Incidents, and shows you the data over time, over time via different breakdowns, like Assignment Group, Incident Company, etc. PA slices data in many different ways that you might not think.

[hm69]

Thank you Michael.  

Very helpful.

[Josh Cooper]

Unless we're thinking of different things, Metrics don't really need database views - and may not actually be compatible with them because of the business rule that has to run.   It'd be an interesting question.

The idea, like Michael Fry pointed out, of metrics is to take that measurement - how long was this incident in "Awaiting Info" state?   How many different Assignees did it have?   How long did it take to resolve, if we don't count "Awaiting Customer".   We make the Metric Definition to tell it what to measure, and then the Metric Instance table holds all the measurements.

Now at that point, even with Metrics, is when you need a database view most likely, because from the Metric Instance, you can't dot-walk back out into the record (ID) field to get info on the Incident or Request or whatever you measured, so then we use the 'incident_metric' database view, etc, to put the measurement in context, if we need more than just the number of the Incident.

But at that point, it's now equivalent to standard reporting - where you can report on what it is and the current time, etc - or report now on a measurement from a month ago maybe.  

The benefit of Performance Analytics is being able to do things like trending, and forecasting, using targets, (and target based notifications).   And the pretty graphs, of course.  

A lot of times we have to use both Metrics and Performance Analytics together to get what we want - like one of our most commonly asked for is "Total Time of Possession by Assignment Group" - you pretty much have to use a scripted metric to get the measurements, then you build your assignment group breakdown (for only the assignment groups that we care about, not potentially hundreds or thousands) and now you can graph and trend that information.

So Metrics are kind of like a power tool that can be used for Traditional Reporting and PA, by letting you easily measure durations of values in a field, or scripting more complicated measurements (both directly targeting the tables we're interested in), but at the end of the day, you're going to be using Reporting or PA against the matching metric database view to get what we want.

Hopefully that helps!

[hm69]

Thank you, Josh.  

Very helpful.  

I need to capture time in each State--this gives me some ideas.  

Again, thank you.