Twin Cities Endpoint Management User Group

We have had Service Desk 7.1 implemented since it was released and have had pretty good sucess with the adoption process.  I have a question that I want to throw out there to see how people are utilizing the Dashboard page feature.  The original 7.0 version also had a Technican Dashboard that was meant to let more IT support people and Manager's keep track of individual metrics, but on 7.1 it was removed and only the Dashboard remained.

I am under the impressoin that with more people running the Tech Dashboard and the regular Dashboard on the 7.0 system, this was really taxing the system with all that reporting running so they removed the Tech Dashboard.  The problem I am running into now is that Managers in IT really want that feature to Manage the Metrics of their individual Teams, but I am afraid that if we give it to too many of them, we will run into System performance issues because of all the reporting needs from that one page.  Along with their desire to have their OWN customized look and feel for their own Metrics the training and permissions to accomplish this, seems daunting. 

My impression is that the Dashboard is really only designed for the Service Desk leadership to keep an eye on Global Service Desk Metrics and all these other Managers should be utilizing the Reports, My Tasks, and Tickets tabs to derive their individual team metrics.

How do other people approach this page and subject in their environment?

Sorry if I am a bit offtopic with this but I wanted to confirm your suspicion about the more complicated pages taxing the system. I do understand that you may want to see detailed information on as much as possible on one page but this is the reality of the product.

The problem is - most web parts used on dashboards or other pages is actually a report that in general runs when page is (re)loaded. If there are many such web parts (= many reports) on the page, this is going to affect ServiceDesk and SQL Server.

We have seen some questions about why the page in portal loads very slow. Mostly these have been about technicians' landing pages - My Task List or Tickets with some added reports on them. I have had to advise removing some reports from a page a number of times. An example - there was a historical Closed Incidents report/web part on My Task List page that had thousands of rows in it which was loaded every time the page was opened.

It is very difficult to give a good advice on this, I guess it is fine to create pages with as much complexity as your server can take. If you start to see performance issues (SQL timeouts, deadlocks when loading the page or users complaining that page takes long to open), make the page simpler.

On the other hand, if the page is rarely used and load time is not a problem, complex page should be fine.

Also, I believe IT Analytics with ServiceDesk reports pack may be helpful in this regard.

MetriX IT Performance Dashboards from Xcend Group (A platinum Symantec Partner) will likely solve some of your challenges around reporting and dashboards. We have a host of KPI's prebuilt for the Entire Altiris Suite including SD. I've included a link for additional details below. If you'd like a DEMO just ask me.