Establishing the Baseline

After becoming familiar with System Monitor and the process of configuring graphs and logs, you are ready to incorporate monitoring into your daily routine of system administration. Routine monitoring over periods ranging from days to weeks to months allows you to establish a baseline for system performance.

A baseline is a measurement that is derived from the collection of data over an extended period during varying but typical types of workloads and user connections. The baseline is an indicator of how individual system resources or a group of resources are used during periods of normal activity.

When determining your baseline, it is very important to know the types of work being done and the days and times when the work is being done. That will help you to associate work with resource usage and to determine the reasonableness of performance during those intervals.

For example, if you find that performance diminishes somewhat for a brief period at a given time of day, and you find that at that time many users are logging on or off, it might be an acceptable slowdown. Similarly, if you find that performance is poor every evening at a certain time and you can tell that that time coincides with nightly backups when no users are logged on to the system, again that performance loss might be acceptable. But you can make that determination only when you know the degree of performance loss and its cause.

When you have built up data on performance over a period, with data reflecting periods of low, average, and peak usage, you can make a subjective determination of what constitutes acceptable performance for your system. That determination is your baseline. Use your baseline to detect when bottlenecks are developing or to watch for long-term changes in usage patterns that require you to increase capacity.

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