Managing the capacity of your standalone servers
As a Capacity Planner, you can use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your standalone systems.
As the flow diagram illustrates, the data source (Gateway Server) collects data from the standalone systems. The collected data is transferred to Capacity Optimization where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your standalone servers.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Managing the capacity of standalone servers
You can analyze and manage the capacity of your standalone servers by using the server views. For the data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first configure data collection.
Task 1. Collect data and install the views
As an Administrator, use BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser as a data source to collect data for your standalone servers. Configure and use this ETL to collect additional metrics, more accurate memory utilization metrics, and performance metrics at a higher granularity.
Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the VMs. The memory utilization value that is collected from an instrumented VM is based on the actual memory of the VM. The Agent collects resource consumption breakdown at process or workload level and helps you to detect specific in-guest OS level resource constraints (for example, in-guest paging due to the physical memory configuration of the VM being too low).
We recommend that you instrument your business-critical VMs to collect OS-level memory usage values.
To instrument a VM
- Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics.
- Configure the Gateway Server and Continuous Optimization Agent to initiate data collection.
For more information, see Collecting data via Continuous Optimization Agents. - Configure and use the out-of-the-box BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect the required metrics from the VM.
After data collection starts, data is loaded in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace tab.
As an Administrator, you must install the Server views and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners to access these views.
Task 2. Analyze the collected data
To view and analyze the granular metrics (actual memory utilization value, workload data, and process level data) that are collected from an instrumented VM, use the Servers-Overview-view.
The following common use cases are described here.
Analyze the trend and behavior of the actual (OS-level) memory utilization of standalone servers
Use the Server-page-in-the-Servers-Overview-view to review and analyze the trend and behavior of the actual memory utilization of the standalone servers.
Determine and analyze the available file system resources and their utilization per server
Review and analyze the relevant metrics on the File-Systems-page-in-the-Servers-Overview-view to determine the available file system resources and their utilization per server.
Identify servers that have exhausting resources
Review the Future-Saturation-page-in-the-Servers-Overview-page to identify standalone servers that have exhausting resources (CPU, memory, storage). This page displays a list of all such servers along with some of their key metric details.
Performing advanced analysis
The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your standalone servers by using a predefined set of metrics.
To perform advanced analysis on the imported data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis. For more information, see Creating-an-analysis.
Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analysis:
Analyze the CPU utilization
The following video explains how to create an analysis to analyze the trend of CPU utilization of a server over time.
Analyze the disk space on the host
- Create an analysis.
See sample configuration values:
- Review the analysis results.
The analysis results are shown in a tabular format. The summary table shows the disk utilization for the host.
Managing future demand
By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. Use Models to predict service performance and obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics, including deep details on the modeling techniques used in forecasts and how to interpret the results of model runs. For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.
Forecast the saturation of a server resource
The following video explains how to create a model to determine when a resource of a server completely saturates.