Baselines (Lab)

What is a baseline?

We can only know if a cloud solution is performing up to our needs is to know our needs, and that is where baselines come into play. A baseline is a collection of data providing performance-related trend analysis. It lets us see what normal operations look like.

The parameters we need to focus on while determining the efficiency of a cloud solution and evaluating the baseline are as follows:

Capacity

The system’s capacity refers to the ability of a system to meet a given demand at a given level.

• CPU utilization is an essential factor to consider. Can it handle the processing requests that come in?
• Network utilization - Will it meet the demand for data transfer that is taking place.
• Storage utilization - Is there enough room to store all the data and information that needs to be stored?
• Access times - There are working hours and non-working hours. What is the working hours window of time? Then there are non-work hours, which are the opposite. So the hours we are not working are defined de facto by knowing the working hours.

Expectation

Baselines then define what is expected today and our current expectations. They can also be used to predict the normal of tomorrow. Hence we can see trends in new demands taking place, or they might be fewer than before if we know our baseline now and what it was a month ago, two months ago, and four months ago.

Therefore, increased demand and decreased demand can help us predict what we need in the future. Possibly there is a time down the road when we can decommission a server because we do not need it anymore. Alternatively, there may be a time down the road when we need to add new servers or new processing capabilities.

Understanding with the help of a tool

It is an excellent opportunity to get some hands-on experience and feel for a tool that helps us set a baseline. Windows has included this tool since the 1990s which can be used to create a baseline. Around the release of Windows 2000, they added a feature to the tool to capture data and save it for us back then. Previously, we had an application called the Performance Monitor, which allowed us to view live statistics as they occurred on our system. However, now with data collector sets, we can take all this data, grab it and store it, generate reports, and use it for establishing baselines.

The first thing we want to do is get the performance monitor up and running in any Windows system with any version. We have to go down to our search field, type in perf, and we will see that it comes up which we can click and run the performance monitor.