Monday, 31 March 2014

Data Sources ( 6 of 15 Data, data everywhere and not a bit to use)

As I said last week, putting aside the hardware utilization data as a given, there are a number of other high value pieces of data that we can capture and use to understand the service.

Application/Service Data

Typically when I’m looking at an application I want to know a few simple bits of information.  How many work units, what type were they, how long did it take to do them.  Nice extras will be things like internal limits, and poor performance indicators (deadlocks for instance).

Databases - These usually have very good instrumentation, and there are usually many agents that can be pulled into service to get the data.

     Well thought out APIs or Windows Counters
     Well thought out Agents do this


SAP - SAP and the like also tend to have a considered way of getting useful data out of them about the workloads, and internal performance.  ie: with SAP there are specific transactions like ST03 which can be run to return data. (CPU, transactions, database changes etc)

     Various transactions return Perf data (e.g. ST03)

What if there is no designed interface? - Not everything has been designed with a clear way for you to get data about its workload & performance.  Then you have to start looking at what logging is available and how you are going to process that to get the data you want.

     Logs, databases, write your own instrumentation
     APM Tools

A good APM tool will give us a LOT of useful information about the workload in our environment and I'll take a look at the benefits and difficulties on Wednesday.

In the meantime don't forget to sign up to our Community, it's free and gives you access to white papers, downloads, on-demand webinars and more.
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Phil Bell
Consultant



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