Guy Recommends
A solution to monitor, manage and archive thousands of
events that are generated by devices across the entire network.
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Introduction to Performance Monitor Strategies
What have performance monitor and sex education in common? In
both cases teaching the mechanics easily, but in both cases the emotional
element is much harder to get across. Whilst my analogy is imperfect, my
point is valid, mastering performance monitor is a higher level art form,
whereas, merely
adding counters is easy.
To get the most from Performance Monitoring, you need a clear
goal
To discover a bottleneck, performance monitor will unearth areas
of high demand, for example, RAM, Processor, or Disk. Logging key counters
can also anticipate problems, for example imminent disk failure.
Baseline, investigating the impact of services on system resources.
What is the network like at night when no-one is collecting email or querying SQL?
Linked to baseline analysis is capacity planning. Do you know what would
happen if you put another 100 users on that subnet? No? Performance
monitor will let you play 'what if..' games.
Learning about systems, is an unexpected bonus, you cannot help but
learn how the operating system works when you measure its performance counters.
For example, insights that database servers use more memory than file and print
servers.
Maximising resources, at the very least, performance monitor will give
you ideas for load balancing servers. Analysis may also unearth
incorrectly configured resource, for example network cards set at 100 Mps instead
of 1000 Mps. Time spent monitoring existing servers will repay when you
are working out the specification for a new machine.
Testing, a double edged sword. Having a test network to try new
configurations will ultimately improve the production network. Performance
monitoring may be the catalyst to commission or strengthen a test network.
Another selling point is that a top specification test network can provide spare
machines when a server on the live network needs to be repaired.
Remote Monitoring
When I was a young 'greenhorn' on my first job, my findings were initially
dismissed because they said that my results were skewed because performance
monitor itself was putting a load on the server. Well, I learnt from that
experience and subsequently, I always monitor the servers from my laptop or a
spare machine.
Another trap that I fell into was trying to monitor a SQL. The problem
was that there were no SQL specific counters on my laptop, what I had to do was
install SQL locally on the machine which was monitoring the live server.
 Guy
recommends: The SolarWinds ipMonitor
My attraction to
ipMonitor is
because it inhabits that zone of part work, part
play; Guy just could not put the dashboard away. This excellent performance
monitor will get you started in the quest to remove bottlenecks on your network. SolarWinds provides this fully-functioning product free for 21 days. So
download
and install ipMonitor, then start scrutinizing your computers CPU, memory and disk
performance. You can also select from zillions more performance counters such as
fan temperature and battery level.
Installing ipMonitor is a breeze, but learn from gung-ho Guy's mistake and
install SNMP on each computer that you wish to monitor. What sealed my
unreserved recommendation of SolarWinds is their support team, you will get
expert help even when you are evaluating the ipMonitor.
Download SolarWinds ipMonitor (21 days eval)
More help for detecting bottlenecks
|
Learn
the secrets of which counters to monitor. Master performance monitor
logging,
develop your skills with structured exercises and examples. Print
out a copy to read, while you design logs and alerts to detect network
bottlenecks.
