Analysis of Labor Efforts and their Impact Factors to Solve Server Incidents in Datacenters

A company's IT infrastructure delivers the basic hardware, networking, operating system, and middleware support to the business' applications. IT service providers perform incident and problem resolution, as well as user administration and change implementation required to maintain the availability and service provided for the business. As a result, they become increasingly challenged with delivering better, faster, and cheaper services to their customers. With the variety of incident tickets reported on a daily basis, understanding where and how much effort is spent to resolve them is critical. Moreover, analyzing the effort data identifies opportunities for self-service and automation, as well as what modernization strategies businesses should implement to reduce incident volumes and, by association, labor effort. In this paper, we conduct a large scale study on the incident and server factors that affect technician effort and quantify their impact. We show that the nature of the incidents and their complexity, the assigned support groups, as well as the underlying OS type play a major role in how much labor effort is spent towards resolving such tickets.