Being Proactive

I can’t over emphasize the importance of being proactive in monitoring your system’s performance from the first day it is installed. The data that is gathered early on, before the system gets loaded down with users, will allow you to set the mark for how the system should be performing. These are the “best-case” figures that you can measure your system’s future performance against. Now, as you gather system activity data on a loaded system, you’ll have a baseline to compare it against.

Every time you make a change, carefully watch how the change impacts your system’s performance. If you wait until users are complaining and performance is severely degraded, you’ll have a great deal of backtracking to do before finding the bottleneck that caused this issue to arise. Was it a change made to the kernel? Was a patch recently installed? Was it a sudden increase in user activity? Is there a hardware malfunction?