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Monday, September 13, 2010

SEDS elements in the Fluke VPM (Application Performance Management tool)

I have just received 2-day training of Fluke VPM tool.   I have already mentioned in my other posting:  
"Baselining and dynamic thresholds features in Fluke and Tivoli tools" Below are my additional comments about the tool. 
  • They have the same approach as our SEDS has - to provide at the application performance status the list of business applications with most unusual response time. And they use a hit chart for that which similar SEDS used ( seeCMG'07 trip reportand the tree-map)
  • Smart alerts and the statistical filtering are used only for response time metric and the alert is issued only based on dynamic upper-limits.
  • Learning period (base-line) is "sliding" just like in main SEDS mode, but it  is based only three weeks raw data history and looks like not grouped by hour-weekdays (like SEDS does) but maybe grouped by work- and off- hours (need to check).
  • I have suggested to the VPM trainer that the statistical filtering could be applied to transaction volume metric as well and not only upper-limits, but lower-limits should be used as unusual low transaction rate needs to be be captured as a potentially bad issue.


 All in all I was impressed by the way they implemented basic SEDS principals to filter application performance metrics. I have suggested to do that in my following CMG paper in 2006  in finally that was done!  "SYSTEM MANAGEMENT BY EXCEPTION, PART 6" (can be found in the posting: 


Also that my paper suggested to use heat chart (tree-map) against network metric too: 

"...For Network devices, the bandwidth utilization can be tree-mapped. Figure shows an example of a Network tree-map. Color coding in this report could be based on exceeding constant thresholds or statistical control limits (SEDS based). Each small box represent a device (size could be indicative of relative capacity, e.g. 1 GB or 100 MB network) and a big outline box could represent a particular application or site (e.g. building)..."