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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Lower Control Limit Usage Examples for IT Capaciy Management

I have recently posted the following question as LinkedIn discussion subject for "Statistical Process Control" group: "Does it make any sense to use Control Charts for capacity management?" and got one pessimistic comment, which included the following statement:

"...The only situation I can think of using a control chart for capacity is if you had a piece of equipment that if over utilized would cause damage or premature wear in which case you would only have an upper control..."

I disagree. My system (SEDS) has a special part (updated lists) called "Unusual Capacity Usage OUTSIDERS" that can help to capture some serious issues with servers, such as database going down, LPAR migration out of a host and other unusual capacity releases, that  are not necessarily good things:

The following control charts from my up-coming CMG'09 workshop presentation are good illustrations of those type of finding SEDS captures:

1. Vmware host issue (VM migration):



2. Unisys server database is down:




3. Mainframe application unusual low CPU usage: