How to monitor and manage disk- Windows Server Capacity Management 101 (12 of 12)

There are two main points to monitor on disk, which are occupancy and performance.

Occupancy – use Free Space Ratio%, this shows you how much space you have left on the disk.

Performance - to measure Performance we use average Response time of reads and average response time of writes.

How to monitor

Thresholds - setting a threshold for disk occupancy is dependent on how quickly you can get additional disk space and how quickly disk space is filling up, but a good rule of thumb is 70%warning and 80% Alarm.

Trends - very important when it comes to disk occupancy as it can show very far in advance when you are going to run out of disk space.

Reports – automate reports

This is a good example of a disk slowly filling up, I could trend on this and easily get the date when I am going to run out of disk space. Having this information is very important in ensuring that there is no down time for any of my important applications. 

I hope my series has been informative and to summarize.

• Capacity management is about ensuring that there is enough IT resource at all times.
• Windows systems are under-utilized because of mistrust in their reliability.
• Virtualization has helped make windows systems more utilized but not completely solved the problem
• It's important to balance the cost of the service to the benefit
• When managing windows systems look at CPU, Memory and Disk.

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Josh Worth

Consultant

Monitoring and managing memory - Windows Server Capacity Management 101(11 of 12)

When monitoring and managing memory in Windows there are normally a couple of questions that people always ask, so I thought I'd deal with these.

How full can I run memory?

I find that a good rule of thumb is 90%.

How do I know when we're starting to run out of memory?

There are a number of indicators that can alert you to the fact that there are problems with memory and these are:

·       Page faults increase

·       Soft faults occur first (move things around in memory)

·       Then hard faults (write pages to disk)

·       Increases reads from and writes to page file (hard faults)

·       Reads from image files can increase

·       Eventually the system will stop responding – or just stop

In my final blog on Monday I'll be looking at how to monitor and manage disk and summarizing.
Don't miss out on our next webinar which takes place next Wednesday ' We’ve got to improve the bottom line! How Business Capacity Management can help to bring profitability to the business.' http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Josh Worth
Consultant
 

How to monitor CPU - Windows Server Capacity Management 101(9 of 12)

As promised today we'll be looking at how to monitor CPU.

Thresholds

When dealing with thresholds there is no one size fits all but a good rule of thumb is 70% for a warning and 85% for an alarm these can and should be tweaked when you have a better idea of performance thresholds for your CPU.

Additionally it is good to have a thresholds in place for when a CPU is being under-utilized maybe threshold for 20% and 10% this lets you know which machine could be pushed harder.

Trends

When setting up a trend, you have to remember the longer the trend the less reliable it is. A good rule of thumb for trend is 3 months, as this gives a reasonably reliable trend and also lets you know within time to make a hardware change.

Reports

CPU Total Utilization Estd% - Report Example

Above is an example of an Estimated CPU core busy over a month for my computer with a trend going forward 1 month, you can see quickly that the trend line is going down. This kind of chart is very simple to create with a capacity management tool like athene^®.

On Wednesday I'll be dealing with Memory and how to monitor this. Don't forget to take a look at our workshops, there are some great ones coming up soon

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html

Josh Worth

Consultant