Scoring System Utilization through Business Profiles

Abstract

Understanding system utilization is currently a difficult challenge for industry. Current monitoring tools tend to focus on monitoring critical servers and databases within a narrow technical context, and have not been designed to to manage extremely heterogeneous IT infrastructure such as desktops, laptops, and servers, where the number of devices can be in the order of tens of thousands. This is an issue for many different domains (organizations with large IT infrastructures, cloud computing providers, or software as a service providers) where an understanding of how computer hardware is being utilized is essential for understanding business cost, workload migrations and future investment requirements. Furthermore, organizations find it difficult to understand the raw metrics collected by current monitoring tools, in particular when trying to understand to what degree their systems are being utilized in the context of different business purposes. This paper presents different techniques for the extraction of meaningful resource utilization information from raw monitoring data, a utilization scoring algorithm, and then subsequently outlines a profile-based method for tracking the utilization of IT assets (systems) in large heterogeneous IT environments. We intend to determine how efficiently system resources are utilized considering their business use. We will provide to the end-user an assessment of the system utilization together with additional information to perform remedial action.