Using Power BI to track service disruption KPIs
This major freight management and logistics organization had legacy enterprise-level reports and product reports hosted across two different BI applications, Power BI and Domo. As they were preparing to upgrade and expand their product offerings, which are dependent upon multiple web services, they determined they needed to track failures resulting from development and migration, such as slow website load times or unplanned access restrictions for new accounts.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
With various reports hosted across two BI applications, this freight management and logistics organization had difficulty tracking metrics related to service outages.
THE SOLUTION
Ollion created dashboards that allow the client to easily drill into details about incidents, slicing by time, product and service.
THE OUTCOME
Our client now can easily access and investigate their critical KPIs as their IT team and executives are all able to self-serve in Power BI.
The goal
This freight management and logistics organization wanted to track how outages of their underlying services affect different products. This involved various service metrics with different types of specificity:
- Amount of downtime, differentiating between degraded service and disrupted service
- Incident causes, including bad development, bug fixes and vendor-caused incidents
- Our client’s KPI performance as compared to manager-driven benchmarks (e.g., 99.95% uptime for their main product category)
The solution
Our client had defined 11 KPIs for this project. To help them better track and meet their expectations for these KPIs, Ollion created detailed Power BI dashboards that allow our client to visualize their metrics. These dashboards enabled easy slicing by time, product and service. A six-tab report gave our client the ability to dig into details about each incident and included URL links to the source data in a SharePoint list.
The Ollion team also created an optimized star schema design layer to improve performance and reduce duplicate information when tracking date and benchmark attributes. We published the dashboards to a Power BI workspace for the client’s IT and executive teams to consume.
The outcome
Following Ollion’s work on this project, this freight management and logistics organization can easily access and drill into critical KPIs. Their IT staff and their executives are able to self-serve within their Power BI dashboards, and the Ollion team also provided general IT guidance for generating additional Power BI reports.
Spotlighting critical KPIs has helped our client direct their IT resources and track failures. Because they’re able to compare their findings to their benchmarks, their development teams are incentivized to ensure code deployments are well-tested and therefore less likely to create incidents in production. This has led to improved deployments and increased our client’s service uptime.
