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

The TrueSight Capacity Optimization Data Warehouse supports a large number of built-in metrics and supports the collection of application-specific metrics.

Related topics

Indicators

Managing-and-analyzing-data-from-your-workspace

Metrics and data series

For each entity defined in TrueSight Capacity 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

Because configuration data changes slowly, the Data Warehouse stores only delta records for them. Tracking configuration data and changes is useful for performing what-if analyses, incident analyses, understanding the reasons behind some performance issues, and so on.

Note

Depending on your user preferences, metrics that have not imported data for some time might not be displayed in the TrueSight Capacity Optimization tree, and are not returned in search results.

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*