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Friday, August 31, 2012

Z Capacity Management without SAS and MXG

I have just commented the following post on LinkedIn:

"Is there anyone using anything else besides SAS or SAS assisted tools for analyzing Z/OS SMF data? If so, what are you using?"


I have involved in some IBM activity to offer an alternative (to SAS) solution to process and analyze SMF data by using TDS + SPSS + COGNOS (all IBM tools).

My part of this is to offer SETDS elements to include in the out-of-box COGNOS (and potentially SPSS) reportingsuch as IT Control Charts, EV based anomaly and recent trend detection.

Friday, August 17, 2012

How to Calculate Availability of Clustered Infrastructure for Multi-Tier Application

That is the task I am working on right now. I have some progress and the approach I found is to build availability graph to consider the clustered infrastructure as a chain of parallel and sires connected nodes described here with formulas. So below is a simple example:









And the availability calculation formula will be: 

A  = A1*(1-(1-(A2*A3)n)*A4

You can play with different level of redundancy "n" of the cluster here. Currently  it is 2 but you could estimate it for n=3 or n=4. That approach opens possibility to quantitatively justify you architectural decisions (not just using "best practices" or "gut feelings"). 

If you know MTTR for each individual component (SW and HW) you could estimate the whole infrastructure availability using this approach.  But how to get that individual MTTR? From vendors - good luck! Maybe from incident records? Or set up special monitoring for that (Synthetic- robotic?)

Other useful resources with formulas that relevant to this:

Thursday, August 2, 2012

SEDS-Lite: Using Open Source Tools (R, BIRT, MySQL) to Report and Analyze Performance Data - my new CMG'12 paper

20202 UPDATE: The SEDS-Lite web app is about to be released!
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I wrote this paper with some help from Shadi G. (from Dublin, also IBMer).
The paper is based on my blog postings:
SEDS-Lite Presentation at Southern CMG Meeting in the SAS Institute
SEDS-Lite Introduction
How To Build IT-Control Chart - Use the Excel Pivot Table!
BIRT based Control Chart

HERE IS THE VIDEO PRESENTATION
Below is the abstract:
Statistical Exception Detection (SEDS) is one of the variations of learning behavior based performance analysis methodology developed, implemented and published by Author. This paper took main SEDS tools – IT-Control Chart and Exceptions (Anomalies) Detector - and showed how that could be built by Open Source type of BI tools, such as R, BIRT and MySQL or just by spreadsheet. The paper includes source codes, tool screen-shots and report input/output examples to allow reader building/developing a light version of SEDS.
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The presentation of this paper is scheduled on December 5th, 2012 Wednesday, 2:45:00 PM - 3:45:00 PM in Las Vegas, Nevada
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THAT IS MY SECOND CMG'12 PAPER. THE FIRST ONE ANNOUNCED HERE:

AIX frame and LPAR level Capacity Planning. User Case for Online Banking Application