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