Performance Monitoring vs. Performance Analysis

DiskSuite Tool gives you the capability for simple performance monitoring of metadevices and physical disks. The goal of performance monitoring is to maximize system performance by making small changes while maintaining data availability. Performance monitoring assumes that you are using a given configuration that you cannot easily or often reconfigure.

Performance analysis, on the other hand, aims to maximize system throughput or minimize latency by trying out various configurations until the "best performance" is achieved. Performance analysis assumes that you can set up multiple configurations and collect a different set of data from each configuration. This requires a different methodology and set of tools to cover such tasks as device configuration, file system management, data collection, test load generation, and the like.

The performance monitoring capability within DiskSuite Tool is best suited for the day-to-day operation of DiskSuite in spotting performance problems associated with hot-spots and bottlenecks. This enables you to monitor general performance trends, look for abrupt changes, and compare data collected for different parts of a configuration. For example, while monitoring a RAID5 metadevice, you might notice one column (slice) that shows much more I/O than the other columns. By moving that column to another disk, you are able to better balance the I/O for the entire metadevice.