Business Metric Correlation (13 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

As mentioned previously it is important to get business information in to the CMIS to enable us to perform some correlations.

As in the example below we have taken business data and taken component data and we can now report on this together to see if there is some kind of correlation.

Business Transactions vs. CPU Utilization

In this example we can see that the number of customer transactions(shown in dark blue) reasonably correlates with the amount of CPU utilization.

Can we make some kind of judgment based on just what we see here? Do we need to perform some further statistical analysis on this data? What is the correlation co-efficiency for our application data against the CPU utilization?

Closer to the value of 1 indicates that there is a very close correlation between the application data and the underlying component data.

What can we do with this information back to the business? An example would be: This graph indicates that there is a very close correlation between the number of customer transactions and the CPU utilization. Therefore, if we plan on increasing the number of customer transactions in the future we are likely to need to do a CPU upgrade to cope with that demand.

On Monday I'll be looking at a Modeling scenario.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Data Correlation for Capacity Management

Correlation is used across many disciplines to identify predictive relationships that can be used in decision support. 

Correlating capacity and performance data is an important tool that analysts should be well versed in. Many software applications are available to assist the analyst in finding correlations and identifying the significance of those dependencies. 

A classic example is correlating workload volumes to resource consumption when calibrating models. Many types of data can be correlated to gain insight into what drives resource utilization and performance throughout the entire computing environment.

I'll be running a webinar which presents a high-level discussion of using correlation in practice and doesn't attempt a rigorous mathematical explanation of the underlying statistics. A rigorous mathematical review can be found on line at many websites with an academic focus for those readers who are interested. 

I'll be reviewing basic concepts of correlation and looking at significance coefficients,

along with limitations of correlation, the types of data to correlate and I'll be showing you some examples. 

I intend to give readers a better working knowledge of how correlation can be used in practice to make informed decisions regarding their capacity and performance management.
Join my webinar on July 22, register for your place now.
http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html


Dale Feiste
Principal Consultant