Midwest CMG

Time Stable Workload Characterization Techniques

Ron Kaminski, Safeway Inc.

Whether you have a fancy purchased analysis tool or use a series of home grown scripts and procedures, how do you efficiently construct workloads from collected data that solve problems, answer questions and require the least handholding so that you have time to effectively communicate the results? This session will concentrate on time-tested techniques and real world examples used to group, portray and describe capacity planning and performance information to your management and fellow technical staff.

The Complexity of Web Transaction End-to-End Response Times

Roger Kovach, Applied Expert Systems

In today's global economy, eBusiness is a vital component of corporate success. In the eBusiness economy a slow Web site is a fast way to lose money.  Overall site performance and availability can either attract users or frustrate them. The difference lies in the ability to maintain consistent, reliable Web site performance despite ever-increasing demands of innovation, performance, and complexity. More often than not, many separate interactions are required within a single transaction. Pop-ups, passwords, and multiple page downloads are just the start. In order to accurately assess Web site performance, the entire transaction needs to be measured from end to end. Discussion will cover the importance of total response time measurement, the complexity of nesting within web operations, the diagnosticvalue of historical analysis, and the benefits of establishing and adjusting a performance baseline. Sample logs and reports will be used to show how key performance indicators can be used to manage Web performance.

Automating Process and Workload Pathology Detection

Ron Kaminski, Safeway Inc.

The author will guide you through his methods and show example process and workload pathologies that can be found automatically. He will discuss various notification strategies that have been implemented and point out some kinks that should be avoided and which have been learned through his experience. There will be open discussion and a challenge for you to contribute to hunting down an efficient way to automatically find some of the remaining known pathologies.

Compliance with New Government Regulations: What does it mean to us?

Wayne Embry, SAS Institute

Bill Jones, IBM

Why consider the new mainframes? Mr. Jones will detail why each shop should be thinking about the viability and cost issues related to their acquisition.

Sarbanes-Oxley: Solutions from a Vendor perspective

Kurt Milne, Remedy

How do you work your way through the rules and regs of Sarbanes and other newly initiated and compliance mandated regulations? This presentation will discuss the problems you will encounter and provide solutions to assist you.

It's All About Performance

Catherine Liu, Applied Expert Systems

Success in today's 24/7 global  business environment often hinges on the ability to manage network  availability and performance, understand routing patterns, and maintain  mission-critical Web sites. In the end it really boils down to one thing:  It's all about performance! Management, Monitoring, Reporting and performance  Service Level Objectives will be discussed. Sample Reports will be used  to show how users can use key performance indicators to manage OS/390-based  TCP/IP networks and Web applications.

Building Solutions that Last

Tom Martin, J.P. Morgan Chase (JPMC)

Is your application testing effective? Are you sure?

This session discusses the J.P. Morgan Chase experience with creating a performance engineering center of excellence that provides testing services for web based applications to ensure they meet performance requirements when deployed into production.