← All posts · 2026-07-24

The IT metrics worth putting in front of a client

If you put twenty metrics in front of a client, they will remember none of them. These are the ones worth the space, drawn from what MSPs and internal IT teams actually get asked about when something goes wrong.

The core six

• Patch compliance. Percent of endpoints patched within your SLA window. The first question after any incident.
• Backup success rate. Percent of scheduled jobs that completed and verified. Pair it with the date of your last restore test, because a backup you have never restored is a hope, not a control.
• Uptime of the systems the client names. Not your infrastructure's uptime. Theirs: the ERP, the phones, the site.
• Mean time to resolve. One number for how fast problems actually go away, split by priority if the client is sophisticated.
• Phishing failure rate. Percent of users who clicked the last simulation. Boards understand this number instantly.
• MFA coverage. Percent of accounts with MFA enforced. Underwriters ask; you should answer before they do.

Situational picks

Add licensing spend against budget if you manage the client's Microsoft agreement, security training completion if they have a compliance requirement, and ticket volume by root cause if you are trying to justify a project that kills a recurring problem class.

Give every metric a target

A number without a target is trivia. 97 percent patch compliance means nothing until the page says the goal is 95 and last quarter was 92. Targets are also where you encode the contract: if the SLA says four hours, the target column says four hours.

Grade it

A letter grade feels reductive to engineers and works brilliantly with owners. One grade, derived from the hit rate, trending across quarters. It is the difference between a report the client files and a report the client forwards to their partner.