Understanding metrics
A metric is a measurement taken on a system or business driver. It is also known as a key performance indicator (KPI) or resource counter.
Some examples of metrics are:
- The CPU utilization percentage of a system
- The number of hits on a web page
- Average number of users logged on to a website
- The amount of memory used for a particular transaction
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization supports a large number of built-in metrics and collection of application-specific metrics.
Metrics and data series
For each entity defined in BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, various data series can be collected that contain useful metrics for capacity planning. Every data series is characterized as follows:
- Resource: The official name of the metric (for example, CPU_UTIL).
- Name: A short description of the resource (for example, a chart label titled CPU Utilization %).
- Subresource: The component of a resource to which a metric refers. The name of the resource includes the prefix BY. For example, the BYDISK_UTIL metric measures utilization by disk.
- Type: The metric type (for example, percentage or rate).
- Location: The position of the resource.
- Unit of measure: The metric's measurement unit (for example, bytes, MB, or number of events).
Configuration data
Systems and business drivers contain a set of configuration data - special type of metrics that either changes slowly over time or remains unchanged. Some examples of configuration data are:
- Core CPU frequency
- Database CPU count
- Database product version
- Hard disk size
- Installed memory
- OS version
For numeric data (example, Core CPU frequency, Database CPU count), the historic data is stored as it is considered as Performance data. Whereas, for string values (example, OS version), only the last value is retained.