By Tim Smith, John Mao, and Ben Erwin. Compiled by Brian Boyko.
Dale Imler wrote in:
I would like to see some information on how to use the SuperAgent and Reporter Analyzer for executive reporting and capacity planning.
The big consideration with capacity planning is that it shouldn’t be done in absence of performance considerations, and you can’t consider performance with insufficient data. Mostly, SuperAgent helps to positively identify those cases where the solution to intermittent performance is increased capacity, and help eliminate false positives where the solution might be something completely different.
Additionally, SuperAgent can measure the degree in performance gain you can expect following an infrastructure upgrade. If you have WAN circuits of various types, SuperAgent shows application performance over each type, and may reveal patterns associated with that type.
If you’re using some sort of WAN optimization, you should keep performance in mind when making utilization based capacity planning, because some types of WAN optimization are designed to raise utilization rates in order to extract better performance. So, if WAN optimization is present and performance is excellent, high utilization needs to be interpreted differently than if WAN optimization wasn’t there. Again, this means measuring end-to-end performance with a product like SuperAgent.
(Continued…)
Reporter Analyzer can also help capacity planning by extrapolating a projection of future network behavior from analyzing the past network behavior (measuring volume, rate, and utilization.) The trends over time are sometimes useful in predicting how much capacity you will need.
As for executive reporting – the general problem with executive reporting is the term “executive.”
Executive is a very broad term. There are network managers, directors of infrastructure, vice presidents of infrastructures, directors of operations, and CIOs. They’re all categorized as “executive” and each office has their own different business problems they’re trying to solve.
Our products address executive reporting through, for example, SuperAgent’s SLA reporting. You can set threshold warnings to alert you when your end-users start to have problems. For example, if less than 90% of transfers for SAP are 500ms or less, you can be alerted to the problem and where the problem is occurring. Simple reports take detail unnecessary for the executive out of the equations and present “green-yellow-red” performance scorecards. That takes away a lot of the confusion.
Another way we do executive reporting is through incident counts for operations groups, which can be broken down per application, per server, or per network link. You can also get application and device ability information – what’s running, and what’s not.
Of course, we’ve recently released NetQoS Performance Center 3.0 – which is free if your enterprise licenses any of our products – and that simplifies the user interface and many of the views. Making the information easier to parse helps the information get to the executive level.
Now, many executives are worried more about business metrics than the nuances of IT metrics. We’re moving towards being able to integrate business metrics with IT metrics in future updates.
No comments yet.