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

Best practice recommendations - Windows Server Capacity Management 101(6 of 12)

So now we have gone over what we need to properly manage a windows environment, here are some best practise recommendations.

There are 3 main components to monitor in your windows systems:

·      CPU – physical utilization

·      Memory - usage

·      Disk – occupancy and performance

These are all components that if they fill up or are over utilized will severely effect performance.

Best practice recommendations - CPU 

What to monitor 

The first component to look at is CPU. When monitoring CPU you need to understand the difference between Logical CPU and Physical CPU, if your system is virtualized then it will be logical CPU as the windows environment does not know about the physical CPU it is being hosted on. 

·      If physical, CPU Total utilization of the machine - a physical system is much simpler as you are directly monitoring the physical components. 

·      If virtualized, CPU usage by the guest system - you will need to know the Physical CPU usage which is under the hypervisor. If you only look at CPU busy and it says 80%, it could be 80% busy of the 5% that has been allocated to it by VMware. You need to look at process level CPU busy. 

·      Process-level CPU busy; if virtualized gives a view of relative usage of the physical CPU busy from the host. It shows you how much CPU time each process is using, this is useful to see where all your CPU time is being used.

On Monday I'll be looking at how hard you can work a CPU.

Josh Worth

Consultant