November, 2009
by Denise P. Kalm, Secretary, NCCMG
Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
About the Author
Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. formerly Cybermation
Our 4th and final meeting of the year drew a great crowd. As usual, presenters from out of town took advantage of the opportunity to come to the Great State of California to enjoy our temperate November; we drew from Massachusetts, Texas, Colorado and even our SC region.
Election day for many in the country was also election day for NCCMG. The results in this closely followed election were:
Chair: Cathy Nolan
Secretary: Denise Kalm
Directors: Johnny Peng and Clayton Ching
Although we enjoy the rousing support we get from the membership, a more competitive election is encouraged in the future; come out and join us in shaping the direction of our group.
Vendor support is really a big part of our success as an organization. This time, Sysload sponsored the meeting, proving breakfast, lunch and most importantly, a great speaker. Emmanuel Sauvion has spoken to us before, and I feel he is a part of our group now. His presentation, "Performance Management in Virtualized Environments," was a timely one as we all contend with this challenge in our work lives. Adding value to this was the fact that he was able to compare and contrast how to manage IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and VMware ESX; a rare chance to look at the challenges many face in a multi-vendor shop.
Dave Day, Colesoft, Inc., presented "Event Profiling in z/OS." He took this opportunity to contrast event profiling with the kind of application profiling we are more familiar with - where the application is "frozen" while the profiler logs records. He believes that you can obtain far more information with event profilers, without incurring any impact or additional resource.
We then enjoyed a networking lunch and a brief product presentation by Sysload. For many of us, these opportunities to really talk to a vendor and see a product add a lot of value.
Scott Sumnier, Optier, presented "Business Transaction Management - The Evolution of End User Monitoring." As we all know, for many years, all we could measure was the response time inside the infrastructure, but as applications became available to wider audiences through networking, this no longer really represented the user experience. Scott told us about how end user monitoring, through such methodologies as synthetic transaction monitors and network sniffers is now evolving into Business Transaction Management (BTM).
The day ended with Brian Barnett, Bank of America and his presentation on "Survival Analysis in Computer Performance Analysis." For those who haven't heard of this technique it is a methodology in statistics that deals with biological events and mechanical failure. He has applied this to performance and capacity analysis and shares how to use Cox Regression Analysis to assist you in your work. This new technique may help all of us get the information we need to do our jobs as performance becomes increasingly critical.
After CMG'09 concludes in December (see you all there), we resume our quarterly meeting schedule on February 2, 2010. Any questions or comments, please contact Cathy Nolan at (cathy.nolan@comcast.net or nccmg@cmg.org).