Guerrilla 2018 Classes Now Open

All Guerrilla training classes are now open for registration.

1. GCAP: Guerrilla Capacity and Performance — From Counters to Containers and Clouds
2. GDAT: Guerrilla Data Analytics — Everything from Linear Regression to Machine Learning
3. PDQW: Pretty Damn Quick Workshop — Personal tuition for performance and capacity mgmt

The following highlights indicate the kind of thing you'll learn. Most especially, how to make better use of all that monitoring and load-testing data you keep collecting.

• How to save millions of dollars with a one-line performance model (video)
• How to minimize chargeback after you lift and shift to the cloud (video)
• How to correctly emulate web traffic on a load-testing rig (PDF)

See what Guerrilla grads are saying about these classes. And how many instructors do you know that are available for you from 9am to 9pm (or later) each day of your class?

Who should attend?

• IT architects
• Application developers
• Performance engineers
• Sysadmins (Linux, Unix, Windows)
• System engineers
• Test engineers
• Mainframe sysops (IBM. Hitachi, Fujitsu, Unisys)
• Database admins
• Devops practitioners
• SRE engineers
• Anyone interested in getting beyond performance monitoring

As usual, Sheraton Four Points has bedrooms available at the Performance Dynamics discounted rate. The room-booking link is on the registration page.

Tell a colleague and see you in September!

Guerrilla Training September 2017

This year offers a new 3-day class on applying PDQ in your workplace. The classic Guerrilla classes, GCAP and GDAT, are also being presented.

Who should attend?

• architects
• application developers
• performance engineers
• sys admins
• test engineers
• mainframe sysops
• database admins
• webops
• anyone interested in getting beyond ad hoc performance analysis and capacity planning skills

Some course highlights:

• There are only 3 performance metrics you need to know
• How to quantify scalability with the Universal Scalability Law
• Hadoop performance and capacity management
• Virtualization Spectrum from hyper-threads to cloud services
• How to detect bad data
• Statistical forecasting techniques
• Machine learning algorithms applied to performance data

Register online. Early-bird discounts run through the end of August.

As usual, Sheraton Four Points has bedrooms available at the Performance Dynamics discounted rate. Link is on the registration page.

Also see what graduates are saying about these classes.

Tell a colleague and see you in September!

Next GCaP Class: September 21, 2015

The next Guerrilla Capacity Planning class will be held during the week of September 21, 2015 at our new Sheraton Four Points location in Pleastaton, California. Early bird rate ends August 21st.

During the class, I will bust some entrenched CaP management myths (in no particular order):

• All performance measurements are wrong by definition.
• There is no response-time knee.
• Throughput is not the same as execution rate.
• Throughput and latency metrics are related — nonlinearly.
• There is no parallel computing.

No particular knowledge about capacity and performance management is assumed.

Attendees should bring their laptops as course materials are provided on CD or flash drive. The Sheraton provides free wi-fi to the internet.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Guerrilla Training: New Location

Finally! We have a new location for our Guerrilla training classes in Pleasanton, California: Sheraton Four Points.

We had some complaints last year about noise from the car parks of surrounding restaurants during the night at the previous location. Four Points is much more secluded. It also has its, own restaurant, which some of you will recognize if you've attended previous Guerrilla classes (more than likely, we did lunch and/or dinner there).

The current 2015 schedule and registration page is now posted. The classroom is intimate and only holds about 10-12 people, so book early, book often.

Guerrilla Classes in March 2014

The upcoming GBoot and GCaP training classes are your fast track to enterprise performance and capacity management. You can now register entirely online using either your corporate or personal credit card.

New topics include:

• The effect of think-time settings in load tests
• Closed vs. open workloads in load testing

Classic topics include:

• There are only 3 performance metrics
• How performance metrics are related to each another
• How to quantify scalability with the Universal Scalability Law (USL)
• IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for Guerrillas
• The Virtualization Spectrum from hyperthreads to hyperservices

As usual, all classes are held at our lovely Larkspur Landing Pleasanton location in California. Attendees should bring their laptops to the class as course materials are provided on a flash drive. Larkspur Landing also provides free wi-fi Internet in their residence-style rooms as well as the training room.

Guerrilla Training Schedule for 2014

With the newfound popularity of smaller sessions that offer highly personalized tuition—along the lines of the Oxbridge system—all of the 2014 Guerrilla classes held in California will be limited to a maximum of 6 students. Overflow will go onto a waiting list for the equivalent class that will be held on a date to be determined. Waitees will be notified accordingly. So book early, book often!

GDAT Class October 14-18, 2013

This is your fast track to enterprise performance and capacity management with an emphasis on applying R statistical tools to your performance data.

Early-bird discounts are available for the Level III Guerrilla Data Analysis Techniques class Oct 14—18.

As usual, all classes are held at our lovely Larkspur Landing location in Pleasanton. Attendees should bring their laptops to the class as course materials are provided on a flash drive. Larkspur Landing also provides free wi-fi Internet in their residence-style rooms as well as the training room.

Upcoming GDAT Class May 6-10, 2013

Enrollments are still open for the Level III Guerrilla Data Analysis Techniques class to be held during the week May 6—10. Early-bird discounts are still available. Enquire when you register.

As usual, all classes are held at our lovely Larkspur Landing location. Before registering online, take a look at what former students have said about the Guerrilla courses.

Attendees should bring their laptops, as course materials are provided on CD or flash drive. Larkspur Landing also provides free Internet wi-fi in all rooms.

GDAT 2011 in Review

As usual, the Guerrilla Data Analysis Techniques (GDAT) class was a total blast. Motivated students always guarantee that. It would really help our scheduling, however, if people didn't wait until the last nanosecond to register for the class. But given the crazy economic climate, I'm more than happy to do whatever it takes to make GDAT fly.

Guerrillas in the data mist [Photo: P. Newsom]

Some course highlights that you missed:

Guerrilla Classes for 2011

The Guerrilla training schedule for 2011 has now been finalized.



Book early, book often!

GCaP Class Highlights

It was sunny outside but we ended up staying in the shade for better lighting balance. Other grads had to catch earlier flights home by the time this shot was taken.

Some graduates of the May 2010 GCaP class. Photo courtesy Manu M.
Here are some of the interesting topics that popped up in class discussions this week:

• How to emulate Internet traffic with load test tools like LoadRunner
• Contol Groups (cgroups) for fair-share resource allocation in Linux containers—not to be confused with CFS (completely fair scheduler)
• Demo of JXinsight by the tool architect (and now Guerrilla graduate) William Louth
• DTrace for Solaris and Mac OS X
• Instruments in Mac OS X (Leopard and higher)
• The performance and capacity implications of cloud computing
• How to get started doing GCaP with VAM: Visualize, Analyze, Modelize
• httperf web workload generator

This is why you too should consider attending an upcoming Guerrilla class.

Plan for Guerrilla Capacity Planning in May

The next set of Guerrilla classes are coming up in May and seats are still available. Book early, book often. Update: Erm ... let me qualify that. The "Boot Camp" class is now closed, but the "Capacity Planning" class running the week of May 10 is still open.


Blast from the past. Some members of the 2006 class. Courtesy Tony Aponte
For those of you coming from international locations, here is a table of currency exchange rates.

(Click on the image for more details)
All Guerrilla classes have a certification level 1, 2, 3, but there are no prerequisites at this time.

Guerrilla Boot Camp Training

Registration for my local Guerrilla Boot Camp classes is still open. The first checkpoint is coming up on Feb 26th. That's when we need to notify the hotel whether or not we're going ahead. So if you're thinking of coming, be sure to enroll soon and don't leave it until the last minute.

Overseas attendees are welcome. Check out your exchange rate against the Yankee greenback.

In a related item: Survey says, "Online Instruction is Less Effective Than Classroom Learning."

Guerrilla Training Schedule for 2009

A preliminary schedule for 2009 Guerrilla capacity planning classes has been posted. A recession is all about doing more with less or, at least, with the capital equipment already purchased. That's a major reason for doing capacity planning.

The class fees and penalties have been increased over 2008, unless you book Early Bird. This means you should start arranging your 2009 training now, so that it gets budgeted. This is going to be rough year. If you do not act preemptively, you may not get in at the last minute (the hotel puts a lot of pressure on us) or, even worse, we may not run the class. Book early, book often!

Another option to consider is having me come to you: Have notes, will travel. That can be more efficient when you have a group of people in your organization who need training. See you in class!

Review of R in NYT and GDAT

GDAT instructor, Jim Holtman, pointed me at this review of R in yesterday's New York Times. It definitely puts SAS on the defensive.

Update: Another piece in the tech section of NYT.

If you want to know how to apply R to performance data, sign up for the Guerrilla Data Analysis Techniques class scheduled for August 2009 and learn from Jim personally.

Guerrilla Training Schedule: A Two Point Landing

After many trials and tribulations, the 2008 training schedule has now stabilized at our new location: Larkspur Landing in Pleasanton, which is only about a mile away from the previous hotel location. The stumbling block for us was not room rates but outrageous contract penalty clauses for class cancellations. Apparently, hotel franchises, which are going to hurt this year in the already obvious economic downturn (I don't care what you call it), have suddenly decided they are no longer in the service/hospitality industry but the gold mining business.

Guerrilla Training Schedule Updates

Because of necessary hotel changes, we are still in the process of organizing Guerrilla Training Schedule for 2008. The bad news is, we still haven't been able to finalize the hotel. The good news is, we are converging. With any luck, everything should be wrapped up this week. Unfortunately, these ongoing negotiations have delayed our normal advertising schedule and one casualty is the new Guerrilla Boot Camp class, which we now have had to move out to July. We apologize to those who will be inconvenienced.

The latest schedule updates can always be found on the Classes page.

Guerrilla Training Schedule for 2008

The preliminary Guerrilla Training Schedule for 2008 has been posted. The embedded PDF includes a brief slide-show of extracts from the various classes. It also includes hyperlinks to the Course Content pages. Some browsers may render the PDF differently. If you have problems, you might try upgrading to the latest Acrobat Reader. The most significant change is that the GDAT class has now been extended to a full 5 days with the addition of Jim Holtman as an instructor, who is "Mr. Wizard" when it comes to using and explaining how to do statistical data analysis with R (or S-Plus).

Please bear with us while we sort out the situation with the hotels. The Crowne Plaza now has new ownership and is undergoing a complete renovation. They are telling us they will be open again by March, but we have to decide if we need to hedge our bets on that claim. It will get sorted out shortly, but if you are planning on attending a Guerrilla class, please make sure you check the schedule page for the latest information.

Guerrilla Certification?

During some recent discussions with a large TelCo client, the issue of certification for the various Guerrilla training classes came up. If I understood correctly, the idea would be to augment each class with some kind of ranking (e.g., Levels I, II, III) to denote the proficiency level achieved by a student taking a particular class. This would be useful to managers who would like to better categorize the level of competency of each employee they send to Guerrilla training. The Guerrilla classes are not currently organized along those lines, but they could be.

There are some possible complicating factors that could creep in. Questions that immediately spring to mind are:

• Would the Guerrilla levels just be an internal ranking provided by Performance Dynamics?


• Is there any need to have such levels certified by an outside institution e.g., a university?


• Is there a need to have such levels associated with continuing education (CEU) credits?

I would be interested to hear from both managers and Guerrilla alumni on this idea.