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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

CMG'10 Interesting Paper Abstracts

CMG.org published the following interesting paper abstracts for the upcoming 2010 national conference that looks like are related to the subject of this blog:

    IT-Control Charts
    The Control Chart originally used in Mechanical Engineering has become one of the main Six Sigma tools to optimize business processes, and after some adjustments it is used in IT Capacity Management especially in “behavior learning” products. The paper answers the following questions. What is the Control Chart and how to read it? Where is the Control Chart used? Review of some performance tools that use it. Control chart types: MASF charts vs. SPC; IT-Control Chart for IT Application performance control. How to build a Control Chart using Excel for interactive analysis and R to do it automatically?

Effective Proactive Service Capacity Management using Adaptive Thresholds
Proactive Service Capacity Management (SCM) is essential to deliver desired service level to its users. It enables service to be available as per the SLA with agreed service performance. For proactive SCM, monitoring and proper thresholds are basic ingredients. Often service usage is seasonal in nature and setting fixed thresholds for alerts can’t take into account the variability of usage and significance of alerts. This paper is aimed at introducing the concept of adaptive thresholds and discusses how this should be utilized to proactively manage e2e service perf and capacity aspects. 
Using Statistical Process Control to Improve the Quality and Delivery of IT Services
This paper presents a framework for the delivery of IT services based on Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI). Starting with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), we develop a process oriented approach based on Statistical Process Control (SPC). We apply the framework to the Change Management process of a large IT environment for a trading software firm, and show how failure-rates of the Change Management process were reduced dramatically. 


Thursday, May 20, 2010

Baselining and dynamic thresholds features in Fluke and Tivoli tools

I have just attended two demo sessions about Fluke VPM and Tivoli Monitoring tools and both presentations included the following new features related to performance Exception Detection technology:

1. Fluke (NetFlow Tracker - http://www.skomplekt.com/pdf/PerformanceAndScalability(fnet).pdf)
- Baselined alarms trigger when normal usage is exceeded.
- Automatically choose a threshold using a baseline, or manually specify.
- Tracker baselines individual elements of a report, not just the total.
- Baseline can be static (learn once) or update weekly (learn every week).

2. Tivoli Monitoring Version 6.2.2 ( http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v15r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itm.doc_6.2.2/new_version622.htm)
- The bar chart, plot chart, and area chart have a new "Add Monitored Baseline" tool for selecting a situation to compare with the current sampling and anticipated values. The plot chart and area chart also have a new "Add Statistical Baseline" tool with statistical functions. In addition, the plot chart has a new Add Historical Baseline tool for comparing current samplings with a historical period.
- Situation overrides for dynamic thresholding.

That is interesting as I personally discussed with Tivoli team possibility to add SEDS like features to Tivoli tools just before I left IBM (about 3 years ago). It looks like they finally have implemented some elements of that technology!

I will be playing with all those features soon and plan to add more comment about how that works.