CMG’13 workshops: "Application Profiling: Telling a story with your data"

The subject was introduced by R. Gilmarc (CA) in his CMG’11 paper: IT/EV-Charts as an Application Signature: CMG'11 Trip Report, Part 1 This time he has shown us some additional development of the idea. Such as “BIFR”:

“What is in our Application Profile?

• Workload – description of transaction arrival pattern

• Infrastructure – subset of infrastructure supporting our application

• Flow – server-to-server workflow

• Resource – CPU and I/O consumed per transaction at each server

Why is an Application Profile useful?

• Prerequisite for application performance analysis and capacity planning

• Directs & focuses application performance tuning efforts

• Building block for data center capacity planning

• Serves as input to a model”

Some modeling approaches were included into Application Profile idea (e.g. CPU% vs. Business transactions) plus the flow is presented as a diagram from HyPerformix tool that is now CA tool.

I see the  BIFR profile is suitable for a predictive model  to run on Performance Optimizer part of HyPerformix.

Also interesting  is the attempt to use BIFR for virtual servers (LPARs) consolidation that includes TPP – Total Processing Power benchmarks. Most interesting is the usage of “Composite Resource Usage Index”  to Identify LPARs that have high

resource usage across all 3 ones: TPP Percent,  I/O Percent and  Memory Percent. Looks like it allows to combine  LPARS optimally on different physical hosts in a ”tetris” way.

I appreciate he mentioned my name in the slides (at the “related work” section) and during his presentation there was some discussion about IT Control Charts. I still believe that IT-Control chart without actual data plotted (see below a copy from my old post) and built for main server resources usage (CPU, memory and I/Os) plus for main business transactions and response time (the same IT-control charts should be built for that – I published couple examples in my other papers) could be a perfect representation of any applications and also can be treated as an application profile!  

For consolidation or workload placement exercises they can be condensed to a few numbers per application, for instance, maximum of weekly upper limits for each chart. Those numbers could be treated as application profile parameters and then used for placing/moving (in a cloud) purposes, for example to be analyzed by some statistical clustering algorithms. By the way, other Cloud management tools already do similar profiling for this. (CiRBA) 

Another interesting idea which also was presented in the workshop is “Application invariants”. I may discuss that in my another post…