Best Practices for Conducting a Performance Evaluation of Your IT Systems

Performance evaluation is the process of determining how well an existing or future computer system meets a set of alternative performance objectives. Arbitrarily selecting performance metrics, evaluation techniques, and workloads often leads to inaccurate conclusions.

How should one carry out a performance evaluation study? The answer is to follow a systematic approach. The methodology proposed here involves six steps:

  • Understand the current environment and define goals for analysis.
  • Identify and gather relevant performance metrics.
  • Select the appropriate evaluation technique.
  • Define characteristic workloads.
  • Analyze and interpret the data.
  • Present the results.

The purpose of this article is to provide IT staff and system administrators with a systematic approach to performance evaluation and point out some common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid


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