The Importance of Business-Oriented Workloads
Focus on Workloads to Connect with the Business
The various workloads and their relative importance to business goals is of prime importance to both IT managers and business managers. In many organizations, business managers would like to know where they were last year at this time, where they are today and where they will be in the next fiscal quarter or two, but even with all of the data currently being collected, IT is more often than not, unable to respond in a way that business managers understand. Certainly, without a clear understanding of the service requirements and relative importance of the workload mix, a meaningful response is impossible or at best, very difficult and time consuming.
What is a Workload?
Unlike discrete computer events (e.g. SQL statements), workloads are logical groupings that represent a body of work that is important to the business. For example, we may want to form workloads based on Java Virtual Machines (JVM) or clusters; or we may want to track the performance of a workload formed by combining all database users in a particular branch office. Workloads can and should be defined in a number of ways to form well characterized entities with a Line-Of-Business (LOB) focus, not just a technology view that business managers find difficult to understand and manage. Advancing technology requires complex workloads to be represented in a way that readily describes their service delivery to the business in terms that are easily understood by both IT management and business management. A distinct advantage of this approach is that IT can use various combinations of workloads to, in effect, market their service delivery to the business by demonstrating the actual value of their contributions. The ability to demonstrate value is something that is too frequently missing from IT organizations.
Different workload groupings can be applied to the same raw measurement data to provide different business perspectives. For example, workloads can be formed by geography, application module, organization, JVM or other meaningful user-defined grouping
Seeing is Believing
Consider the following example that will demonstrate, quite clearly, the importance of understanding system workloads. Figure A shows all of the workloads on a single node combined into a single system-wide workload. From this view it appears that activity for this application is relatively static since utilization remains fairly consistent throughout the measurement interval.
Figure A - All workloads on node are represented as a single workload that appears to be in a relatively steady state.
Now, in Figure B, the same time interval is shown but this time there are 8 different workloads defined that are competing for the same resources on (or attached to) the same node. This workload view of the same time period tells a very different story. Notice how some workloads show an increase in utilization over time, some decrease and others only appear at specific intervals. It is then up to the business managers to assign the relative importance of each of these workloads. For example, the “Sales – CA” workload is very small when compared to either the “Sales – TX” or “Sales – NY” workloads but it may have some strategic importance that only the business manager responsible for it would know.
Figure B - Significant variability can be seen during the same time period on the same node when the overall workload is broken out into individual workloads
Viewing Workloads over Time
BEZVision places a business lens on performance data transforming it into actionable information. Detailed measurements, workload-oriented analytics and powerful predictive capabilities combine to help IT align more closely with the needs of the business. The key difference between conventional performance solutions and the BEZVision is the ability to view business-oriented workloads over time, including the future!
BEZVision automates workload characterization and performance evaluation and uses optimization technology to evaluate appropriate remedial options and tradeoffs. It then uses this information to generate actionable advice for choosing and justifying database or other system changes that are necessary to avoid any negative impact on the business. BEZVision also enables a continuous, closed-loop process of workload management by automating the comparison of actual results with expected results after implementation of recommended actions. In essence, BEZVision translates IT data into business-oriented workloads and then uses those workloads to generate actionable recommendations to optimize alignment of IT with constantly changing business needs.
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