ITIL Metrics and Measurement 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: An organization measures Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) for incidents. What aspect of service performance does MTTR PRIMARILY capture?
- How often incidents occur within a given period
- How quickly normal service operation is restored after an incident (Correct answer)
- The financial cost associated with each incident
- The number of users affected by a service disruption
Correct answer: How quickly normal service operation is restored after an incident
MTTR measures the average time elapsed from when an incident is detected until service is restored to normal operation.
Question 2: A manager wants to know whether IT changes are causing more problems than they solve. Which metric would BEST answer this question?
- Change success rate measured as the percentage of changes with no post-implementation incidents (Correct answer)
- Number of RFCs submitted per month
- Total downtime hours across all services
- Average time to approve a change request
Correct answer: Change success rate measured as the percentage of changes with no post-implementation incidents
Change success rate directly measures whether implemented changes achieve their objectives without causing new incidents.
Question 3: In ITIL, what distinguishes a leading indicator from a lagging indicator in service measurement?
- Leading indicators measure financial performance; lagging indicators measure technical performance
- Leading indicators predict future performance; lagging indicators reflect what has already happened (Correct answer)
- Leading indicators are set by customers; lagging indicators are set internally by IT teams
- Leading indicators require automation; lagging indicators can be collected manually
Correct answer: Leading indicators predict future performance; lagging indicators reflect what has already happened
Leading indicators provide early warning signals of future performance trends, while lagging indicators confirm historical outcomes.
Question 4: Which practice in ITIL is MOST responsible for defining, collecting, and reporting on service metrics?
- Problem Management
- Service Level Management (Correct answer)
- Monitoring and Event Management
- Continual Improvement
Correct answer: Service Level Management
Service Level Management owns the process of agreeing on and reporting service performance metrics against agreed targets.
Question 5: A CIO asks for a single number that summarizes overall IT health. An ITIL practitioner warns against this approach. What is the MAIN risk?
- A single metric is too difficult to calculate accurately
- Aggregating into one number hides individual performance issues that require action (Correct answer)
- Regulators require multiple metrics to be reported separately
- Single metrics are more expensive to track than multiple metrics
Correct answer: Aggregating into one number hides individual performance issues that require action
Composite scores can mask poor performance in one area being offset by strong performance in another, leading to missed problems.
Question 6: Which term describes the scenario where IT measures what is easy to count rather than what truly matters for service quality?
- Metric inflation
- Vanity metrics (Correct answer)
- Service dashboarding
- Threshold creep
Correct answer: Vanity metrics
Vanity metrics look impressive but do not correlate with meaningful outcomes or help drive better decisions.
Question 7: An organization sets an availability target of 99.9%. Over one month (720 hours), how many hours of downtime is this target equivalent to?
- 0.072 hours (approximately 4.3 minutes)
- 0.72 hours (approximately 43 minutes) (Correct answer)
- 7.2 hours
- 72 hours
Correct answer: 0.72 hours (approximately 43 minutes)
99.9% availability means 0.1% downtime; 0.001 × 720 hours = 0.72 hours, or approximately 43 minutes.
ITIL Metrics and Measurement 3
An organization measures Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) for incidents.
What aspect of service performance does MTTR PRIMARILY capture?