Response to a question on use of reporting for IT Service Management

A question was asked about the use of reporting for IT Service Management, which I will answer from a MOF perspective, for more information see http://www.microsoft.com/mof. Typically Service Monitoring and Control would be one of the key service management functions (SMFs) that would feed valuable metrics to a reporting mechanism. There you would collect data on aspects of operations for all services being monitored. This would feed Availability Mgmt, Capacity Mgmt, and Service Level Mgmt (SLA and OLA reports) reporting needs.

In addition, an Incident Mgmt reporting system would then record metrics on incidents and a Change and Configuration Mgmt system would feed metrics on changes to the environment, what CIs are affected in a CMDB, etc. These two should be tied together so that you can report on the number of incidents as a result of a change to see how well Change Mgmt is performing. And conversely, you can report on the number of RFCs created as a result of incidents to help measure the success of "changes" to the Incident and Problem Mgmt processes.

There is a great amount of detail behind this of course, but this should be a good starting point.