CMG 2007: Day 3
December 6, 2007Things are really moving along now. Lots of sessions to attend, not much time between them. Here is my summary of the sessions I attended today:
Statistics for Performance Analysis & Capacity Planning
This session was actually presented in 3 separate sessions each an hour long by Ray Wicks from IBM. I’m probably at a bit of a disadvantage to many of my colleagues because I have never taken a statistics class or had to work much with them. It was very enlightening to get an introduction to many of the concepts in statistics, at least the ones that pertain to Performance Analysis and Capacity Planning. There was still a lot of the Greek alphabet, but I think I walked out of the session with new and valuable information.
To Instrument or Not to Instrument, That is the Question
This session covered instrumenting code (regardless of language) to make application performance management much more effective. The focus was on “always on” metrics that could be useful for keeping tabs on what’s happening. I think the main point was that by the time you know you have a problem, it’s too late to change the code to add instrumentation and increase the probability of introducing new bugs. The happy medium is somewhere between no logging and leaving debug turned on in production.
Death to Dashboards
This was probably one of the more highly anticipated sessions of the conference so far and has certainly been the most entertaining. The main theme was that displaying information on “traffic light” dashboards can only indicate so much information. For example, that server shows red but “how red” is it? How long has it been red? How important is the system? The presenters, Peg McMahon and Justin Martin from Sprint Nextel presented some of their experiences in implementing a capacity and performance monitoring system. The alternatives presented went along with some of the other data visualization techniques discussed in other sessions. The one I had not seen previous was Treemaps – a neat way of visually displaying lots of information in a small space using different sizes and colors. It reminded me of tag clouds in a way, but more graphical.
ITIL v3 Capacity Management: A Review
I’m not sure what I expected to get out of this session. I’ve heard ITIL mentioned numerous times in the past few years, but I don’t think anyone really gave me a one or two sentence summary of what it’s for and why you would use it. I guess I have a little better understanding now, but a lot of the references in this session were assuming you already knew a little of ITIL v2. Still confused a little, need to do some more research on the concept.
Coming on Friday
Before I close this summary, I thought I would post the abstract for the session I’m presenting on Friday:
There are dozens of tools available for monitoring application and system performance, each with their own particular flavor or specialty. Over time, tools may be added to meet specific needs and “tool sprawl” can occur. This session explores the effort to deploy a consolidated Capacity and Performance Reporting solution. The team pursued a solution using Cacti, an open-source front-end to RRDTool, and existing tools. The end result was a cost-effective, multipurpose solution to the “tool sprawl” problem.