Modeling IT support organizations using multiple-priority queues

Abstract

As IT services grow more and more complicated, and their management becomes increasingly challenging, IT support organizations assume an essential role to ensure the delivery of Service Level Objectives. What-if scenario analysis represents a very effective tool for the performance optimization of IT support organizations, as it enables an iterative and customized performance optimization process. The problem of accurately modeling IT support organizations requires the development of sophisticated models as well as dedicated parameter inference techniques and tools. This paper presents a multiple-priority queuing model suited for the reenactment of IT support groups developed from the analysis of empirical evidence, as well as a powerful method to infer the model parameters. We applied our model to reenact the behavior of a real life IT support group with our Symian simulator. The results demonstrate that multiple-priority queuing models can reproduce real life IT support groups with a high degree of accuracy.