Creating performance baselines
Apart from the normal operational monitoring of your servers, it's important to build and document performance baselines of your server workloads. A performance baseline can be as simple as a set of metrics for the processor percentage, overall processer usage, memory, disk space, and network throughput observed and documented over a time period during peak and off peak business hours. Performance baselines should be captured on a recurring schedule and the frequency dictated by the business criticality and/or workload type. Once established, you can compare real-time performance metrics against the captured baseline for comparison. Not only is this useful for diagnosing issues and for cost tracking and optimization, but the ability to observe any odd performance metrics also helps with identifying potential security attacks. The benefits of performance baselining include the following:
- Risk mitigation
- Capacity planning
- Improvement...
