Baseline Validation (Lab)

Introduction

When we perform a baseline confirmation, what we are doing is saying, we have got this minimum baseline that we have to satisfy. If we get more than that, it is absolutely fine but the baseline must be confirmed because otherwise, We will not get the performance that we would like out of that system.

Metrics consideration

CPU utilization

CPU utilization refers to the maintenance of the processing demands that are being placed on it effectively.

Memory usage

Memory usage deals with the question of having sufficient memory for all of the processes and activities that are running on the machine?

Disk operations

Do we have sufficient free space so that our storage can grow if it is required to overtime?

Network utilization

Network utilization deals with the question of whether we are using more network resources than we should, to be able to perform well, or are we continuing under the desired threshold?

Auditing configuration

Lots of times we avoid including auditing in our baseline, but we should keep in mind that the baseline is the minimum that has to be in place when we use any system. And it is not always about performance but it is about functionality. Auditing is stating, that we need to make sure certain things are logged, security incidents, etc.

Management tool compliance

Management tools make sure that we are using the proper tools so we do not want to use HTTP for a Web-based management interface, we use HTTPS to ensure encryption. We are not using Telnet for remote command-line access, we are using SSH for remote command-line access, so there is encryption.

Other metrics considered

OS, application versions, and patch levels. If we are running Linux, are we using the proper distribution? Is that the correct version of the kernel? Is it the proper patch level of the distribution?

Baseline evaluation

How will we move to do a baseline performance comparison? We will take a look at three metrics and see how we would go by looking at the baseline metric, getting the information from the environment about what it sounds like within the deployed system followed by comparing the two.

Baseline metrics

So we are starting by viewing our baseline document. It can be a straightforward Excel spreadsheet that simply lists for us our CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk read/write operations count in this case.

Where does that baseline come from? It either came from the fact that we determined that is what we want, or we checked out our existing systems that do not seem to be within the cloud and the way they were performing and that they were working well for us. So if we get the identical performance within the cloud, we are good to move to the cloud.