Too many servers not enough eyes - or where did all these servers come from?!(6 of 9)

Choosing the right data to trend

Part of the building of trend reports and trend alerts must include a detailed analysis of the business patterns, both from the data collected and by talking with the business units.

Include peak periods in your trend sets, but exclude data that would eliminate the benefits of trending – exclude days where the server may sit idle such as holidays or weekends and activity that has nothing to do with the application itself. Try to identify and allow for seasonality to derive the underlying trend – a trend that may need to be prepared for separately from other trending efforts.

Take advantage of workload characterizations – building trend sets of metrics reflecting just the applications running on the system can provide a much more granular view and can show the analyst and management much more quickly when there are changes in application volumes.

And finally, seek out metrics coming from the business units themselves. Many business units (or even the applications that they run) can provide useful business numbers, for example, the number of transactions per hour, the number of web hits, or the number of telephone calls handled by the customer service function.

Trending those values along with performance metrics and making a connection between the numbers the business people can understand and the numbers the analysts understand can potentially reduce some of the disconnect between the data center and the business units.

Instead of reporting that performance will suffer once a certain trended metric or set of metrics hit certain performance values, try to report back to the business units in the business terms they understand, such as: “Performance will start to suffer in the XYZ application once you handle more than 280 calls/hour.” Business unit management will not only understand better, but they will also be able to see the urgency of ensuring that capacity is adequate for that eventual business load.

To download the full version of this blog visit http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_documents/papers/too_many_servers.pdf

Rich Fronheiser
Consultant