June, 2007
by Dave Thorn
The Spring meeting of Philadelphia was held on May 18. Registration was a healthy 34. Our Featured Vendor was Premitech, and they also had a program slot in which John Reuder presented Solving the IT Dilemma: What is Actually Delivered to the Business - IT Performance Measurements From the End-User's Perspective. John discussed the ability to measure end-to-end response and the benefits it provides.
Next, CMG Board member Rick Ralston presented Using SAS/Graph to Display Performance and Capacity Data, in which he showed interesting ways of presenting data using SAS/Graph. These included typical charts we're all familiar with, but then he veered into some fascinating territory with heat charts. At first glance these charts appear somewhat strange, but after Rick's explanation they proved to be an interesting way to depict large amounts of data on one page.
After lunch Bill Shelden of The Information Systems Manager presented Some Issues in Modeling VMware ESX Server. Bill explained two approaches to modeling VMware ESX Server, focusing on how the two designs reflect the impact of changing the number of virtual CPUs in virtual machines running under Vmware ESX Server. He concentrated on CPU throughputs and response times. Some published benchmark results were used to validate the preferred model design.
Finally, Frank Bereznay of Kaiser Permanente presented Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics. This paper not only won a Best Paper award at CMG2006, but was awarded the J. William Mullen Award as well. Frank's presentation shows how statistical techniques can be employed to identify deviations in metrics that are due to causes other than normal variations. He also provided SAS code to do this, as well as suggesting reporting packages to be utilized for this work.
Philly CMG will be taking the Summer off, and resuming activities with our meeting on September 14, followed by our annual T-shirt meeting on November 16.