Wednesday 20 August 2014

Questions you should be asking (CM in a can series 7/10)

Normally, a capacity manager would expect to capture a “business cycle” worth of data in order to determine the peak periods and the proper modeling intervals.  Without that, the capacity manager would need to gather information about the application via interviews from the business side and would need to rely on that information.

I needed to use the data in combination with the information from the subsequent interviews – I had data for about a month – and in some cases, I and my team, had to model the annual peaks based on the data we had captured in combination with the information we got from the interviews.
Sample interview questions to ask are:

          What are the current business volumes?

          What are the predicted business volumes?

          What is the application architecture?

          Are there any predicted changes to the business, the business volumes, the architecture or anything that will change the nature of the application or the infrastructure?

Most of the time in the interview process was spent getting to know how the applications worked.  These applications were very complex and many of them spanned 3-4 tiers and included the mainframe or a large data warehouse backend.
It was important to understand how the web servers, for instance, interacted with the middleware or the application servers and how workloads here affected traffic to the database servers or to the mainframe. 

This process was incredibly useful in getting enough background to make a month’s worth of data adequate (if not ideal) for us to make decision support recommendations.  However, this process was not without pain, which we’ll investigate shortly…
Moving forward….

As part of the scoping exercise done prior to the start of the formal project, applications were prioritized by the Capacity Manager.  This allowed me to group the applications in a meaningful way and assign them to consultants who then took on primary responsibility for completing the work.
Once the consultants received their assignments, they poured through the data and the application architecture diagrams and, as would be expected, found some gaps in the information or some clarification that needed to be made.  Additional meetings were held and more information gathered.

Remote access was provided to the CDB/CMIS so the consultants could work remotely on the project and have the most recent data from the systems.
Other data was gathered from existing sources, including data from the SAN as well as network statistics and some native virtualization statistics.

Modeling was completed for each of the applications – for some applications trending was used, for others analytic modeling was used. 
A standard report template was used to provide a common look-and-feel for each of the applications.  These reports were delivered, as early as possible, to the Capacity Manager and the staff in order for the reports to have a sanity check applied.  One common feeling by the consultants was that it would’ve been preferable for those doing the work to capture the information.  I certainly agree, but this is one of the ways I tried to minimize the project preparation time. 

Once the drafts were approved or additional information was provided, final reports were written and delivered for management (mainly the CM and the mid-level managers).
I’ll be dealing with how we summarized the results on Monday.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

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