Every Transaction Counts: Business Transaction Monitoring with Sharepath

Managing day-to-day IT operations can be stressful.

Why is our e-commerce site slowing down at 11:00 pm every Thursday? How will I support the roll-out of a new service without adding more hardware?

If you had the analytics needed you’d be able to accurately isolate the problem and make an informed business decision.

Every IT shop has a dashboard of information that shows what’s happening at any given time.

Most of you will have a selection of tools but with each one only able to handle a specific task, or conduct random samplings, it’s difficult to get a complete snapshot of what’s really happening.

Capacity planning is an important step in forecasting how IT can support the growing needs

of the business.
One of the challenges that you have is simply knowing which servers and components serve which applications to begin with and let’s face it, without this knowledge it‘s difficult to go through a proper capacity planning process.

With SharePath you can trace transactions and their paths through the datacenter. By feeding transaction contextual data into our athene modelling software this data can then become the basis for addressing all of the capacity questions faced by an organization.  It means you can predict the effect of change at a granularity that means something in terms of business functions, for example, what if we get more sales, what if we merge with ACME Corp?

This provides you with a valuable insight into the performance of your enterprise data center infrastructure never previously available.

 Join us at our free webinar on May 9 and discover how you can plan your future infrastructure requirements in terms the business understands.

Register now http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html and I’ll look forward to speaking to you there.

Phil Bell
Consultant

Storage Capacity Management

We’ve been posting some interesting articles on storage and storage issues from a capacity perspective on our social media this week. A link to all the articles is at the bottom of my blog if you’d like to read them for yourself.

With the advent of Cloud, Virtualization and Big Data, there’s no doubt that storage, how it performs and its capacity is becoming ever more crucial to organizations. Big Data analytics for example, depend on high performance.  To be cost effective it requires commodity infrastructure provided as cheaply as possible.  DAS, SAN and NAS are all viewed as costly and not quick enough.  SSD and SATA will become the norm.  Having enough resource but not too much for a workload that can vary dramatically over time will be critical for cost containment.
Effective capacity management has always been the way to provide adequate capacity for your company at controlled costs, both now and in the future. With the complexity of infrastructure nowadays that means looking at performance and capacity across the whole range of platforms, applications and devices. Storage becomes an ever more vital part of that picture.
At Metron we’ve long been exponents of 360°Capacity Management: looking at performance and capacity challenges from all possible angles. So it’s no surprise to us that you need to bring storage data in to your CMIS. It needs evaluating alongside all the other metrics you should be capturing, both business and technical, along the length of the application chain, across all services. 360°Capacity Management provides great ways of helping you do just that.

We’ve got an informative webinar coming up tomorrow which will look at the key storage metrics you should be capturing and why, to enable you to get that cost/service balance right. 

We like to categorize it as prevention and cure.  It covers what to look at to make sure storage problems rarely occur –prevention. Any medical man will tell you that prevention is never 100% guaranteed, so we’ll also cover metrics you need to watch to identify problems when they occur, so you can cure them.

Register and come along on April 25

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Links to articles featured on our Social media

http://www.informationweek.co.uk/storage/systems/cloud-storage-infrastructures-raise-many/232600705

 

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/video/Server-virtualization-issues-contribute-to-data-management-complexity

 

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/converged_storage-virtualization-converged_infrastructure-virtual_machine_performance-thin_provisioning,2-242.html

  

Some additions to the blog...

For going on 3 years, we've regularly posted to our Capacity Management blog.  I'm quite proud of what we've done up to this point.  Some highlights:

We've posted a number of blog series that received great feedback.  Here are some of my favorites.  I'll include the months in case you want to find them:

• Too Many Servers, Not Enough Eyes (January 2011)
• What Do They Really Want to Know (July/August 2011)
• Capacity Management in a Can (September / October 2011)
• VMware vSphere - Avoiding an Internal Storm (October / November 2011)
• The Changing Face of Capacity Management (January 2012)
• Mind the Gap (April 2012)
• Using Systems Capacity Data for Business Intelligence (July 2012)
• Five Trends in Capacity Management (August 2012)
• vSphere vs. Hyper-V Performance Showdown (September 2012)
• Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav/GPS (January/February 2013)

All told, we've posted over 250 times to the blog since it was started.  With the start of Metron's new year in April, we'll be expanding the use of the blog in a few ways:

(1) I'll be posting regular thoughts about the direction of Capacity Management -- if I see a great article, if I hear someone give a great paper, if I have something that's more than 140 characters to say (if it's less, I'll probably send out a tweet instead) I'll probably post it to the blog.

That reminds me -- if you're reading this and you're not a subscriber, you should probably subscribe to the blog.  I use an RSS reader to ensure that I get all of the updates and you can also choose to receive email notifications of updates.

While you're at it, follow us on Twitter (@metronathene), like us on Facebook, subscribe to The Capacity Management Channel on YouTube, and follow our LinkedIn company page.  Each of these outlets is best suited for different content and styles and we'll be communicating with you in all of these ways this year.

(2) I'll be asking my colleagues to do the same.  Metron has some incredibly talented and experienced people in the area of Capacity Management and it's my plan to start asking them to write when they see, hear, or learn something interesting that they want to pass along.

(3) We read other blogs and articles, too!  We'll use the blog (and other social media) to link to articles we find interesting and educational.  Feel free to send me anything you think is worthy of being linked or posted here.  You can comment on the blog or email me at rich.fronheiser@metron-athene.com.

The usual great content and blog series will continue as well moving forward.  Metron and its people have had a lot of great interactions and experiences in its 27 years of existence and we're always excited to be talking, blogging, and tweeting about Capacity Management, so stay tuned.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Do you have quality, capacity management data stored in a CMIS (or related mechanism) that you can quickly access?

One trigger that can expose the lack of an effective capacity management process within a company is a pending merger or acquisition.  

I had the privilege to manage a project where a team of talented consultants was tasked with starting from scratch and providing capacity planning guidance and recommendations to a company undergoing a series of merger-related application consolidations.

When I say starting from scratch, I mean just that: The first step of the project was to quickly start capturing performance data on mainframes and servers that underpinned a few dozen applications and services so we could use a variety of techniques (including analytic modeling and trending) to predict the effects of expected change on these systems.

Probably a good time if you're reading along to stop and think about this -- do you have quality, capacity management data stored in a CMIS (or related mechanism) that you can quickly access?  Do you know how utilized (over-utilized, under-utilized) your systems are?  Are you able to look at underlying trends and potential changes to the environment and make recommendations to the business?

In my past, I worked as a capacity planner in a number of industries.  At each of those companies, we had regular data capture in place on all production and many test systems.  The cost of doing this was clearly outweighed by the benefits provided to the business.  We were the first point of contact whenever there were performance problems with applications and we were the first point of contact when business conditions warranted a predictive look at the services and the resources that provided those services.

In future blog entries, I'll come back to this  and pass on some wisdom I gained from the process ... hopefully a nugget or two of which you'll be able to take back and apply in your own environment.

In the meantime you might want to sign up to our community and take a look at some of our white papers on Capacity Management

http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_published_papers/index.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer

Key Performance and Capacity Concerns for Data Storage

Capacity management is responsible for ensuring that the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure is able to deliver agreed service level targets in a cost effective and timely manner (ITIL v3). Doing capacity management properly means getting in front of potential capacity related problems before they happen.

Storage is one area of the IT infrastructure that is typically not as transparent as others. It is the epitome of backend infrastructure, the end point where the most critical items in IT exist; when it is not available you are down. 

However, given the shared nature of  storage, being completely down may be a better option than the alternative. The alternative might be chronic intermittent performance problems that are only bad enough to annoy and frustrate customers. It could also be severely under-utilized storage across many terabytes or petabytes of data that go unnoticed and unbilled, but it is getting paid for ultimately out of a budget somewhere.

There are many examples where high impact problems could be evolving in your storage infrastructure hidden from view. The first step in identifying these problems is to implement a sound capacity management process for it. While identifying and preventing potential problems does not receive the glory of firefighting, savvy managers know how valuable it is and recognize its importance.

Join me at my webinar Key Performance and Capacity Concerns for Data Storage April 11 where I’ll be discussing ways to assist the storage administrator in the complex task of managing storage.

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant                    

Key Performance and Capacity Concerns for Data Storage

Storage Area Networks (SAN) have become ubiquitous in the modern datacenter.

Today’s modern storage environment consists of a complex mix of equipment that interconnects systems to centralized storage. A direct access storage device (DASD) I/O request starts at the host bus adapter (HBA) and extends through a network, and possibly other devices, before finally getting completed at a storage array or intervening cache.

Managing capacity for  storage is a complex task that typically overlaps several areas of responsibility. Storage administrators are often tasked with allocating storage and maintaining hardware, along with managing capacity and performance.

This approach is good in that storage administrators have intimate knowledge of their storage environments. However, storage administrators typically don’t have time to look at all aspects of capacity management in a proactive fashion, and this creates a reactive mode of operation.

Operating reactively means troubleshooting performance impacts after they happen, allocating storage on short notice, and having their allocated storage be severely under-utilized.

Proactively getting in front of incidents before they happen is what capacity management is all about.

I’ll be discussing ways to assist the storage administrator in the complex task of managing  storage in my April 11 webinar.

So why not register for your free place and come along http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html

Dale Feiste
Consultant

Capacity management for storage can be difficult

Doing capacity management for storage can be difficult with the many complex and varied technologies being used.

Given all of the options available for data storage strategy, a clear understanding of the architecture is important in identifying performance and capacity concerns. A technician looking at metrics on a server is often seeing only the tip of a storage iceberg.

However, the host view is important when looking at measured I/O response. If response times are severely impacted on a busy server, then end users of the hosted applications will also be impacted. High response at the OS typically originates somewhere in the backend storage infrastructure. Tracking and reporting on key metrics at the host and backend storage controllers can prevent these incidents from occurring.

Having the right tools in place can be the difference between prevention and firefighting.

Proactively getting in front of incidents before they happen is what capacity management is all about.

There are times when historical trending and analysis is not sufficient to forecast future events that will impact a backend storage environment. Being able to forecast and model data from your backend storage controllers, can provide a proactive capability for making important decisions.

Events such as acquisitions, consolidations, big projects, etc. can have a large impact on your storage performance when they occur.

Planning for these types of events with the proper tools can greatly reduce the risk to the end user.

I'll be hosting a free webinar on April 11th where I'll discuss ways to prevent performance problems in your storage environment and you can register for this event now.http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html.

Dale Feiste
Consultant