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Managing, Maintaining, and Growing Performance Management Architecture

Managing, Maintaining, and Growing Performance Management Architecture

Today, if an application is slow, users consider it unavailable. To offer services in this low tolerance environment, performance and capacity must be monitored. Operations should discover performance problems before users call the help desk. Capacity must be added before utilizations impact performance. We consider performance to include the end to end environment – from the user back to the database, including the network. You’ll find a number of process questions in this quiz because managing performance is mostly about managing – it’s process.

Take our quiz below to see where you stand in this process.

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by
Jeff Drew, Practice Director, Application and Systems Performance
Brooke Stockton, Practice Director, Network Operations & Infrastructure Management
Aaron Meyers, Director of Strategic Operations


1. What does Performance Management architecture mean to you?	a) Performance Management software functionality b) Specifications of the hardware, the software will run on c) Software components, their interoperability as an integrated system, and how the integrated system supports the performance management process
2. Does your organization have a documented Performance Management architecture and an implementation roadmap?	a) I’ll find it if I look for it b) Some basic documentation c) Well-documented architecture and implementation roadmap under Change Control, blessed by the management
3. What does Performance Management mean to you?	a) Availability of the network only b) Perceived response time from a user’s perspective c) Both
4. Do you have a well-defined Performance Management process in place?	a) Yeah, whenever our users/customers have a performance problem, they call the Help Desk b) Yeah, the hardware and bandwidth are dirt-cheap. We always buy more than we need c) Yeah, the process is documented
5. Have do you defined the roles and responsibilities of various organizations in the workflow related to Performance Management process?	a) No b) We sort of understand our roles c) Well-documented roles and responsibilities including inter-organization hand-offs and escalation procedures
6. Can you map steps in Performance Management process with the associated systems?	a) No clue what you’re talking about b) Well, I know how to get my performance reports c) Sure! It is well-documented as part of our end-to-end performance management process
7. Does your Performance Management system feed into the following systems?	a) No, what for? b) Fault Management/Network Monitoring System c) Capacity Management
8. Do you have products with overlapping functionality?	a) Some b) None – completely mutually exclusive c) Few but their roles in the overall architecture are well-defined
9. How do you manage performance of the underlying infrastructure?	a) Wait for user complaints b) Wait for an outage event and then get budget to buy more hardware c) Proactively monitor and identify bottlenecks before they impact users
10. Do you have a forecasting or trend reporting in place?	a) Not really. We wait for “disk full” error b) We apply threshold on various performance related parameters c) We use thresholds in conjunction with trending analysis
11. How do you evaluate Performance Management products?	a) Given the economic conditions and influence of corporate procurement, strictly based on price b) Technical feature set c) A combination of vendor viability, our end-to-end infrastructure management architecture and performance management requirements
12. How do you know that there is a performance related issue in your infrastructure?	a) Normally, our users call us to let us know b) There is a threshold trigger event on our network monitoring console c) The performance issues are identified and addressed proactively based on thresholds and trending analysis
13. Do you have systems and processes in place to localize a performance issue?	a) Not really b) Only by trial and error c) Yes. Can break it down to various components in service path
14. Do you monitor applications and servers?	a) Yeah, only availability b) Process up or down c) Transaction response times
15. Have you identified the performance parameters you want to collect and report upon?	a) A few b) All threshold parameters c) All threshold parameters along with collection frequency and aggregation intervals
16. Do you use Performance Management reports for?	a) Capacity Planning b) Managing Service Level Agreements c) Both
17. How well have you instrumented your infrastructure is instrumented to support the Performance Management Architecture products?	a) Network availability instrumentation only b) Utilization instrumentation c) Response time and utilization instrumentation
18. Do you take advantage of management features embedded in network devices (like Cisco SAA, for example) even though these features may have performance impact?	a) No, we don’t b) Device performance is so important, we don’t turn these features on c) We always struggle on how to improve performance metrics with minimal impact on device performance
19. Security Policies typically limit Performance Management features provided by current tools (e.g., SNMP breaches, disabling ICMP echo on some interfaces). How willing you are to open security in favor of manageability?	a) Not at all b) Maybe some c) Well, we’re always looking for right balance
20. How critical are internal SLAs to you?	a) We don’t discriminate. We treat everyone equally b) Our users have been asking for it, we are not there yet c) We allocate our costs to various users and departments based upon SLAs agreed upon with them
21. How do you validate that your network service provider is meeting the SLAs?	a) We trust them b) The service provider sends us a monthly SLA compliance report c) We validate service provider compliance report with our own measurements
22. How do you resolve disputes as your measurements differ from the ones you receive from ISP, ASP, etc?	a) Very easily b) It’s a long process that shows little return c) It’s a tough process but with payoffs in money back and increased quality of service