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Guy's Best Practice Ezine 149 - Performance Monitoring
As you watch the Olympic Games, you may ponder on how to adapt its famous ideal
of Citius, Altius, and Fortius to your network. I suggest your mantra
could be: faster response, higher throughput and stronger network
performance.
How would you achieve such a goal? Why through performance monitoring.
If you play sport yourself then I expect that you are looking for an edge over the
opposition, maybe a bat which hits further, or a glove with better grip.
Well, you can combine business with pleasure and play network games such as, find the bottleneck, maximise resources, and
make cost-nothing improvements. The secret of winning the server
battle is to get a good performance analyzer
such as ipMonitor.
What I find from mixing with computer techies is that many of them
would love to be a champion of performance monitoring. IT managers
want to identify servers with a shortage of RAM. They love
planning how they can redistribute services to achieve better load balancing
amongst their servers. It makes their day if they can design
performance monitoring which identifies why the network is running slower
than previously.
Guy's Mission
Regular readers know that I love a mission. Nothing gives me greater
pleasure than getting people started on a fresh challenge.
This week I want to give you a thinking man's guide to monitoring a server's
performance. The person I have in mind is someone who has flirted with
the Windows built-in tool perfmon, but would like to try a better and easier utility
such as
ipMonitor.
ipMonitor
What attracted me to ipMonitor was its bank of red, orange or green lights which indicate the status
of each resource on each server, it's like I imagine mission control at
Houston. What you have to see for your self is the mind-blowing level
of extra detail; just double click on the icons
and drill down to see the performance of resources such as memory, CPU, disk.
You can also remotely monitor hardware, for example, fan, temperature and
battery.
One key benefit of the console is that you don't have to remember thresholds
for when available memory is critical, or when CPU utilization is abnormally
high, ipMonitor sets the counters automatically. And yes you can
change values once you know what you are doing. What's more, you don't
realize how much you are learning about the operating system, the hardware
and their dependencies.
Those with experience of configuring SNMP public communities, and setting
'Destination Traps'
will take to ipMonitor like ducks to water. My challenge is to help
those with little knowledge of SNMP and MIBs to get up and running with this
classy utility.
Guy's 1st Law of Installation.
Any company who says, 'Our software is the world's easiest to install' -
lies. The corollary is also interesting; anyone who tells you a
program is hard to install makes you want to prove them wrong, and you can't
wait to put them straight with, 'That install was a piece of cake'.
With ipMonitor Guy's position is this, ipMonitor is easy to install, but
only if you do these three things:
1) Install SNMP on the servers
2) Suss
out the 'Credentials'
3) Read the 'Getting Started' section of SolarWinds'
help file.
Download your free copy of ipMonitor
True Diagnosis - Ideas to develop your performance intuition.
Memory, the true cause, often masquerades as a disk problem because memory
shortage cause lots of paging to disk. Performance Monitoring is not
an area to 'throw money at'. Take a customer of Mad Mick's. Their
machine was running slowly, lots of disk activity, so they bought new faster
disks. Did it cure their problem? No, it turned out that the
office Psycho had taken a memory SIMM out of the server and put it his own
desktop.
Time for a digression, why might you need this performance monitoring skill?
My reply is to develop your intuition for finding and removing network bottlenecks. To
help you answer questions such as, which servers needs more memory?
What cost-nothing tactics can I implement, for example, move that processor hungry
application to another server. Also, get into the habit of asking
smart questions such as, 'How come other companies of our size don't have a
slow network?' Ah ha, they use packet switches, whereas we just have a router.
The bottom line for performance monitoring is that it warns you that a
storm is
brewing on your network, and moreover, it helps you solve the crisis before your
nemesis
'Psycho' is on your back - again.
Eddie's Bizarre Assignment
I have an acquaintance called 'Barking Eddie' when we meet he always has
an interesting tale to tell about his computer consultancy project.
However, because Eddie is also a good poker player, I can never tell when he
is bluffing. (Eddie comes from Barking, Essex, England, although some
of us think he really is barking mad.) Anyway, this is the gist of
what he told me about a recent consultancy job.
A multi-national company based in Birmingham, England discovered that their office in Kano City, Nigeria, was the most efficient in their
entire organization.
Downtime was non-existent, and their support manager won the award
for the fewest user complaints two years in a row.
Yet the CEO's instinct was that his British team was the best, and he just could not
understand how the Nigerian system could produce better stats than his
crack team at HQ. So
he hired Eddie to analyse the secret of Kano's success.
As luck would have it Eddie started monitoring the remote Nigerian
network in December. When Eddie got around to analyzing the data in
January he was amazed that the server data
for Christmas Day was the same as for early December. He had to check
that they really did celebrate Christmas in Kano Nigeria. The answer
was they did - big time.
Eddie could only come up with one conclusion, the Nigerian operation
was a phantom workforce, or at least, one
that did not use the Kano regional headquarters. Indeed, a private
detective discovered that someone
had setup ghost personnel records and was
siphoning off 72 salaries into a Cayman Island bank account. Thanks to Eddie and his performance
monitoring a serious fraud was unearthed.
Naturally, the company are
embarrassed how two or three people could disguise the fact that 75
people appeared to be working in one of their offices, but they gave Eddie a handsome payoff to
keep the details under wraps. The only reason that I tend to
believe Eddie's account is that when he told us the story he bought two
rounds of drinks, the first time that's happened in living memory.
Footnote The word 'Nigeria' was blocked by the
spam control on my Autoresponder, it took me 24hrs to suss it out, and this
is why the ezine is one day late.
If you are looking for handy network utilities, try some of the free downloads at
Tools4Ever
Conclusion
I don't want to miss a chance to emphasise how much fun ipMonitor is to use.
Many of us welcome the chance of breaking free from mundane tasks such as
changing users' passwords, testing backups. Now somebody in your
organization should be saving money by maximising resources. Analyzing
and configuring your network is just that chance to undertake a satisfying
job which needs doing, but probably nobody in your organization knows how to
tackle properly.
I maybe losing business as a consultant here, but its
much better for organizations to build-up internal expertise in performance
monitoring than higher external consultants.
ipMonitor will transform a good amateur into a top professional.
Download your evaluation copy of ipMonitor
Will and Guy's Humour
This week Will and Guy bring you
funny
animal road signs.
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