RE: Performance Metrics

Lou,

Have they told you want they want to do with the results of these
"performance metrics"?  What will they be used for?  If they won't be
used for anything, then why produce them :-)

But seriously, I consider it my job to enable the business to take in as
much money as possible while spending as little as possible -- so, I
look for business metrics like how many orders we process per hour and
compare that to system resource consumption per hour.

Ideally, we process trillions of orders per hour while consuming very
little system resource :-)

In my system, we use business metrics like customer logins per hour (we
record login history in the DB) and order line items per hour -- and I
compare them to thinks like logical reads per hour and executions per
hour (via statspack/perfstat).  

Ideally the business metrics increase while the system resource metrics
decrease.  If that's the case, I can tell my management that they can
migrate to cheaper, smaller hardware or delay hardware upgrades until we
need to.  If it's not happening -- I tell my management I'm aware of it
and that I'm working to fix it -- and they should see the results after
we drop our new software to production.  

If they don't see results, they can hold me accountable.  And that's how
it should be.

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 8:21 AM
To: avramil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Performance Metrics

Lou,

What business are you in?

Find out which business processes are essential to your business, which
are opportunities for profit if done faster, and any service level
agreements with customers that cost your money if transaction completion
is slower than some rate.

Design a dummy transaction that can be factored out of the real results
or reversed for each important business function. Usually this can be
done without custom programming, but you need to get sign off from
whoever controls your Sarbox (Anderson bankruptcy re-employment act)
policies. You also need to make sure that your dummy transaction cannot
trigger a business event. For example, if you code up an order entry
dummy transaction, make sure that the withdrawal from inventory does not
trigger a re-order event, and make sure you stop short of actually
generating the paperwork to schedule the manufacture of something to be
delivered to your office.

The dummy transactions should be light-weight so that you do not
materially degrade performance during peak load. Design switches to turn
off each dummy transaction so you can prove that your dummy transaction
alone is not material in load (or in the alternative find out that you
designed a problem transaction). Also Design a master switch to turn off
all dummy transactions. This is convenient for when everything going to
hell in a hand cart, you've sampled enough during the crisis, and you
want to absolutely rule out the dummy transactions from consideration as
the cause of the problem. This is useful even if you know to a
scientific fact that the dummy transactions cannot be part of the
problem.

Measure pretty much all the time and log the results so you can tell
when "the system is slow" from the perspective of business users. Most
especially, as business grows over time and transactions overall
increase in rate, you might eventually reach a point where your dummy
transactions are chronically slower. That is a good time to inspect your
capacity planning process for a review if you don't already have
upgrades scheduled.
A good side check is rate of redo log generation, but remember to factor
out any special maintenance events as outliers. Also track system level
statistics such as cpu utilization, disk(farm) saturation, network
saturation, controller load, etc. A correlation of these numbers against
the rates of your dummy transactions can be very useful in predicting
future degradation.

Also find a way to count user transactions per hour or per day by some
useful category that represents the business. Once you get enough points
to feed into a least squares analysis for reasonably confident
projections, this can also inform your capacity planning process. (Don't
bother printing the results unless you also calculate a confidence
range.)

Make a projection how long it would take you to be back in operation at
an alternate site if everything goes perfectly in the transition. State
that is a best case analysis in your report and significant risk factors
in the plan.

Make a projection how long it would take to do a local recovery if
something goes so bad you have to do a full restore.
Make a projection how long it would take to do a local recovery if you
lose an entire storage array.

There is more, but that should put you in good stead. None of this has
anything at all to do with performance tuning or repairing a bad current
process (although there is a chance you might identify a bad process if
a dummy transaction you would presume is for a trivial amount of work
takes forever.) If your management is asking the question for respond to
some fad of "these numbers are good" then this won't help you much. But
if your management is trying to get a handle on the system time
requirements to process business flows, you will put them in a position
to make good decisions about how to improve the business. One of those
decisions will likely be to justly reward you for taking a vague
question and giving them a meaningful answer that causes the business to
make more money.

------------------------------------
Rightsizing, Inc.
Mark W. Farnham
President
mwf@xxxxxxxx
36 West Street
Lebanon, NH 03766-1239
tel: (603) 448-1803
------------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Lou Avrami
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 3:56 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Performance Metrics


Hello all,

Upper management has just ask my group to provide performance metrics
for our database servers and databases.  Even after a couple of
conversations we're not quite sure what they mean by "performance
metrics", and I'm sure they aren't quite sure what they mean, either.
;)  

We could give them Statspack report output, but that probably would be
too much information.  

If anyone out there has any ideas on what kind of (very) high-level
Oracle database metrics might be appropriate, it would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Lou Avrami
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l




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