Tutorials · IT Leadership

How to Measure and Report Network Performance to Management (KPIs and SLAs)

Management does not want interface graphs. Choose a few clear KPIs, measure them automatically and report them monthly to show reliability, security and value.

Beginner12 min6 steps

Before you start

  • Monitoring in place (NavCloud, SNMP, syslog or similar)
  • Helpdesk ticket data

Step by step

  1. Choose 6–8 KPIs

    Examples: availability per site (%), Internet link utilisation at peak, Wi-Fi client experience, number and duration of incidents, mean time to repair, patch/firmware compliance (%), critical vulnerabilities open, backup success rate.

  2. Define targets

    Set realistic targets with the business, for example 99.9% availability at main sites, critical vulnerabilities fixed within 14 days, 100% config backup success.

  3. Measure automatically

    Pull numbers from monitoring, the ticket system and scan reports. Manual collection does not survive busy months.

  4. Report on one page

    Green/amber/red per KPI, the trend versus last month, the top three issues and what you are doing about them.

  5. Link to money and risk

    Translate results: downtime avoided, incidents prevented, cost per user. This supports the next budget.

  6. Review with suppliers

    Use the same data in reviews with ISPs and service providers to hold them to their SLAs.

Pro tips

  • Fewer, trusted numbers are better than many unclear ones.
  • Explain each red KPI with cause, impact and fix date.