I've been a Capacity Manager in three different industries. At each, I was mainly focused with hardware capacity and ensuring that we didn't have hardware bottlenecks for any of our applications. Less important was making sure that we didn't have excessive headroom or capacity on the floor (thereby wasting money) at any given time.
Times have changed. Alignment to the business brought about by a focus on ITIL and other process methodologies has meant that the normal reports generated by the Capacity Managers just aren't enough anymore.
Business managers have no interest in knowing what the swap space utilization is, nor do they care about data stores, resource pools, clusters, network adapters, or any of the other technology that makes the business work. As in my previous blog, they just want to flip the light switch and see light.
So naturally, the focus needs to be more on services and applications and, specifically, the transactions that matter.
It's impossible to set and police viable service level agreements if there's no way to measure how long transactions take. Furthermore, there's no easy way to improve the performance of transactions without knowing how much time is being spent in each layer of the infrastructure. Sure, a transaction is supposed to complete in 10 seconds, but if the transaction is spending 15 seconds at the database, that would seem to be a reasonable place to start.
Today's Capacity Manager needs to be involved with the hardware, sure, but also needs to be aware of and tracking the performance of business transactions -- the objects that are important to the business managers.
Remember, those managers don't want to know why performance is poor -- they just want to flip the light switch and see light.
This is why I'm excited about our Correlsense SharePath and RUM (Real User Monitor) products. We capture and store component utilization data with Athene that's vital in determining how much headroom is available and also can be used in determining how close we are to a hardware bottleneck. Sharepath captures data from all of the meaningful production transactions and gives a starting point for root cause analysis when transactions aren't performing as promised.
If the problem's a capacity problem, Athene can be used to drill down and find opportunities to remove bottlenecks. If the number of transactions are growing over time or the business anticipates the number of transactions increasing, Athene's Planner can model these changes to anticipate when the bottleneck will happen.
It's an exciting partnership of products and helps close the gaps, providing the Business, Service, and Component views that effective Capacity Management demands.
http://www.metron-athene.com/documents/factsheets/published_paper/correlsense_and_metron_transaction-based_capacity_planning.pdf
Rich Fronheiser
VP, Strategic marketing
No comments:
Post a Comment