The MTBF: The metric your help desk should be tracking today

Metrics are at the heart of ITSM, delivering crucial insights into operations and helping you identify areas that need improvement. One such key metric is the mean time between failures (MTBF). This metric aids in identifying areas in the IT infrastructure that often fail and disrupt operations. With this metric, IT teams can identify the root cause for such recurring disruptions and ensure they are minimized.

If you are looking to learn how this metric would help your IT efforts, you are in the right place. In this article, we will look at the MTBF, how to calculate it, and how to increase yours.

What is the MTBF, and why should your IT teams monitor it?

When there are frequent failures of IT infrastructure assets, whether networks, servers, or workstations, they have a cascading impact on the availability of IT and business services. These disruptions lead to a loss of revenue and reputation. If a particular IT asset sees frequent downtime, a repair or replacement is often required. Before that, it helps to investigate and understand why the asset goes down often and in what circumstances. This lets you plan asset maintenance and improve system availability.

The MTBF is the metric that helps you identify downtime causes and mitigate them or plan for the quick recovery and better availability of IT systems. If the MTBF of a particular IT asset is low, it means the asset sees frequent downtime, leading to IT and business disruptions.

An MTBF example

In an organization, new updates to the storage drive kept failing whenever new Windows firmware updates were applied. This occurred a few times, and the MTBF became worse. After analyzing the issue, the team determined that a third-party driver caused the API required to conduct the update to either be faulty or not be implemented.

When a new update is scheduled, if third-party drivers do not implement the necessary APIs, there are two possible solutions to explore. Swapping the APIs with the Windows alternatives for the SATA and NVMe storage protocols or obtaining a newer, better supported version of the driver from the OEM can help you implement updates, fix bugs, and close security loopholes. Monitoring and tracking driver upgrades and downtime can assist in improving the availability of the storage drives.

How to calculate the MTBF

The MTBF is the total number of operational hours divided by the number of failures. For example: A laptop was operational for 1,000 hours in a year, and during that time, there were four failures. The MTBF is 1,000/4 = 250 hours.

How to improve your MTBF

• Implement a process to observe the asset health to track and monitor failures. This helps you identify the causes of disruptions.
• Analyze the root causes of problems to create awareness, address long-term causes, and improve asset performance.
• Create a quick response strategy to effectively tackle and reduce downtime that impacts operations. The objective is to achieve fewer disruptions and more time between them.

Summary

The MTBF provides insights into your service desk's effectiveness at preventing future disruptions. This metric empowers IT teams to achieve higher operational efficiency by pinpointing the root cause of persistent incidents. IT teams can improve their incident response strategy with a clear picture of areas where IT operations are impacted.

Organizations can implement metrics such as the MTBF by using them as KPIs rather than just performance objectives. Metrics point out areas needing process simplification and operational improvements and are not merely targets to hit.