My CMG 2007 Presentation Schedule

This year, all CMG 2007 sessions will be held in the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego starting Sunday, December 2 and going through Friday, December 7. Currently, my sessions are scheduled as follows:

1. Sunday Workshop
   
   Session 191
   Sunday 1:00 PM - 4:30 PM
   Room: Elizabeth D/E
   
   "How to Move Beyond Monitoring, Pretty Damn Quick!"
   
   Monitoring and a performance database are fundamental to successful performance management and capacity planning. A plethora of tools, both commercial and freeware, are available to aid in that task. The strength of those tools, however, lies in monitoring operating system data on a per-host basis rather than business metrics, process transaction rates and web-user response times. Moreover, modern applications are tiered across multiple hosts. This leaves open the problem of how to stitch all these data together in such a way as to be able to assess capacity for application scalability and service level objectives. PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) is an open-source, freeware, performance modeling tool that helps you to solve that problem. PDQ has been developed over the past 15 years and is used by a number of corporations as part of their routine capacity planning. PDQ is available in C, Perl, Python, Java and PHP, and runs on any platform including: AIX, Solaris, Linux, z/OS and Windows XP. In this tutorial, you will learn the same techniques I have used with PDQ to solve actual capacity planning problems associated with multithreaded WebLogic servers, a spam-filtering farm, a tiered e-business application, a client-server insurance application and more.
   
   
2. CMG-T (Introductory CaP courses for newbies)
   
   Three Sessions 431
   Wednesday 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM
   Wednesday 2:45 PM - 3:45 PM
   Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
   Room: Elizabeth D/E
   
   "Capacity Planning Boot Camp"
   
   What is capacity planning? How does it differ from performance tuning? How do I get started? If you've been asking yourself these questions, then this CMG-T course is for you. As the name implies, capacity planning for computer systems is about predicting the future. Financial planners do that all the time so, not surprisingly, many of the tools and techniques are similar. The difference lies in the data to be analyzed and the metrics used to express computer system performance rather than financial performance. And just like today's fast-paced business climate, IT decisions are made and revised so rapidly that merely providing your management with a sense of planning direction is often more important than calculating the compass bearing. Elsewhere, I have called this kind of tactical planning, *Guerrilla Capacity Planning*. This boot camp course will get you in shape in three sessions.
   
   
3. Paper 7050
   
   Session 511 (Advanced)
   Hot Topics
   Monday 4 pm - 5 pm (different from published time)
   Room: Elizabeth D/E
   
   "Seeing It All at Once with Barry"
   Dr. Neil J. Gunther, Performance Dynamics
   Mario Jauvin, MFJ Associates
   
   Improving visualization of performance data is an orphaned area of performance tool development. Tool vendors avoid investing in development if they see no demand, while planners and analysts do not demand what they do not know. We attempt to cut this Gordian knot with 'Barry' a 3-d visualization tool based on barycentric coordinates. Potentially hundreds of computing nodes can be viewed as an animated cloud of points whose shape is correlated with the workload dynamics. 'Barry' provides an optimal impedance match between the measured computer and the cognitive computer (the analyst's brain). We also plan to have some spiffy visualization demos.