November 3, 2009

Sponsored by Sysload Software

Magnolia Room

Carr America Conference Room

4400 Rosewood Drive

Pleasanton, CA 94588

8:30 – 9:30      Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:30 – 10:30    Performance Management in Virtualized Environments

Speaker:  Emmanuel Sauvion, Sysload Software

Today, some type of Virtualization can be found in just about every IT shop on the planet. Server troubleshooting and performance management has changed since the emergence of Virtualization, and this presentation will review the various changes and focus on specifics and similarities of three major players in the market today: IBM AIX, SUN Solaris and VMware ESX.

10:45 – 11:45  Event Profiling in z/OS

Speaker:  Dave Day, Colesoft Marketing Inc.

All of the application profiling products on the market today have a common theme - they all run on an interval, where there is a sleep component and an active component. During the active component, the application is usually ‘frozen’ while the profiling logic records information from various control blocks associated with the application. The data recorded by the profiler is referred to as ‘state’ data. The ‘state’ of the application can be deduced by examining the recorded data. Event Profiling takes a different approach. The data to be recorded starts at the processor level, not the address space. Event Profiling starts at a lower level. Processor event data is gathered for all active processors for the z/OS image. Processor event data is then scanned for those events that relate to the profiled address space/application, and only those events are recorded. The event data recorded by the operating system indicates the ‘state’ of the application for a given event. By combining events, it is possible to create a profile for an application that is orders of magnitude beyond the capability of existing ‘state’ profilers. And, it is done without any impact to the target application.

11:45 ‑ 1:00    NCCMG Business Meeting/ Elections/ Lunch sponsored by Sysload/Sysload Product Presentation

1:00 – 2:00      Business Transaction Management - The Evolution of End User Monitoring

Speaker:  Scott Sumner, Optier

There is a paradigm shift in how IT organizations are monitoring their mission critical applications today.  Because IT organizations are service oriented, the approach to monitoring should be from the user’s perspective and not from an infrastructure perspective.  Moreover, this user experience is delivered through their actual business transactions. Over the years technologies such as synthetic transaction monitors and end user monitors (network sniffers) have provided some visibility.  However, neither technology has provided a complete and comprehensive view into the performance of critical business transactions.  With Business Transaction Management (BTM), IT organizations are now empowered to focus on the exact point where the Business and IT intersect.   This presentation will cover how End User Monitoring is evolving into BTM to provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring your applications from a business transaction perspective.

2:15 – 3:15      Survival Analysis in Computer Performance Analysis

                        Speaker: Brian Barnett, Bank of America

Survival Analysis is a statistical technique that deals with biological events and mechanical failure. It uses a nonparametric approach that handles continuously distributed and discrete data, detects significance, enables predictions, evaluates time to events (response time) and allows event censoring (equipment swaps). Brian’s presentation will provide insight into how Cox Regression Analysis works and how it was implemented using SAS to identify critical components of computer performance and capacity problems. This methodology worked and improved performance in areas that were previously intractable.

 Please pre-register by contacting Keith McAndrew at (916) 715-8352 by Friday October 30, 2009. Registration is $25 at the door.

Report from the August 2009 meeting:

   Speakers:  Ron Gordon, Dr. Stephen Guendert, Stephen Few, Jaqui Lynch

Call for speakers in 2010. If you are interested in speaking, call Cathy Nolan at (925) 675-5308 or (925) 890-8390.

If you have not attended a meeting within the last two years, you will be deleted from the mailing list.  To remain on the mailing list, either attend one meeting or email cathy.nolan@bankofamerica.com by November 1, 2010.