August, 2007
by Frank Bereznay
SCCMG had a very successful summer meeting Friday, August 10, sponsored by SAS at their Irvine training center. The Southern California region is very appreciative of the support we receive from SAS and our other technology partners.
This meeting featured four excellent presentations and a lunch time update from SAS on futures for their foundation product set and the ITRM solution commonly used by IT professionals. A continental breakfast and lunch was also provided.
The first presentation, "JAVA Performance Analysis 301", was presented by Peter Johnson. Peter was a co-winner of the J. William Mullen Award at the 2006 International Conference in Reno. Peter is a consultant with UNISYS. This is the third presentation Peter has developed on JAVA performance management. He began the presentation by briefly outlining the material covered in the first two and used that foundation to examine the freely available tools and techniques, including JAVA Management Extensions, that can be used to monitor and manage these workloads. Analysts interested in better managing JAVA workloads can obtain copies of all of Peter's papers from the conference proceedings CD or hardcopy. Peter also announced that a fourth paper on this subject has been accepted for this year's annual conference in San Diego.
Claire Cates, CMG National's Treasurer, was the second speaker. Clair is an internal consultant at SAS focusing on Software Performance Engineering for the SAS product set. She is the expert that gets called in whenever the developers are having difficulties in optimizing their code. Her presentation focused on the commonly encountered performance problem she has found and how to correct them. This presentation was titled "Where's Waldo: Uncovering hard-to-Find Application Killers" and was originally presented at the 2004 National Conference in Las Vegas.
"Payment Systems: Managing Response-Based Service Levels" was the title of the third presentation by Jon Schmidt of Transaction Design, Inc. His firm specializes in the development of EIS type management reporting systems for high volume mission critical business applications. Jon walked the group through the elements of these scorecards and showed many examples of what the reporting would look like. The library of sample reports provided attendees many good starting points for their own EIS systems.
The final presentation of the day, "Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics", was presented by Frank Bereznay. Frank received a Best Paper Award and the J. William Mullen Award for this paper / presentation at the 2006 Conference in Reno. This presentation reviewed some of the standard variance based statistical detection techniques and how to apply these methods using the Multivariate Adaptive Statistical Filtering (MASF) methodology that Annie Shum and Jeff Buzen published in their 1995 paper.
SCCMG continues to partner with our friends up North, NCCMG, to share speakers for meetings. This meeting Claire Cates and Frank Bereznay participated in both the Northern and Southern California meetings. We are planning ahead and have already arranged for Jaqui Lynch to hold a half day UNIX Performance and Capacity workshop for our November meeting. So, mark you calendar now and reserve Friday, November 2, for the Southern California meeting and the following Tuesday, November 6, for the Northern California meeting. We are expecting a large turnout for this workshop.