What PaaS performance metrics are you using to measure the success of your Cloud platform initiative?  Adopting a few PaaS performance metrics can help you avoid the high-expectations, low-benefit trap that befalls many IT transformation initiatives.  Rather than measuring for measurement sake, PaaS performance metrics can help you benchmark benefits, encourage adoption across the organization, and justify continued investment.

PaaS performance metrics can be divided into three groups that correlate with maturity categories:  foundation,  optimize, and transform.

Foundational PaaS performance metrics focus on time to market.  Key metrics include:

• Time and effort to create new application environment
• Time to redeploy application
• Time to promote application into a new lifecycle phase

Optimization PaaS performance metrics focus on portfolio efficiency.  Key metrics include

• Ability to dynamically right-size infrastructure and elastic scalability
• Ability to re-use existing platform services and business services from resource pool instead of re-building solution stack

Transformational PaaS performance metrics focus on productivity.   Key metrics include:

• Time and effort required integrating business process, event processor – creating a complex app.
• Time and effort required to apply policy across tenant(s)
• Cost to operate application per user or transaction measured against the value provided by the application or transaction.

Create a PaaS performance metric dashboard to measure progress towards your goals, and highlight how your team is meeting expectations!