IT Systems Management, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Performance and Tuning

Introduction

The systems management discipline of performance and tuning differs in several respects from other infrastructure processes, and this chapter begins by explaining these differences. The first difference is that—as this chapter title implies—these are actually two related activities normally combined into one process. We continually tune infrastructure hardware and software, as well as their interrelationships, to improve the performance of systems. The discussion of differences leads to a definition of the performance and tuning process followed by a listing of desirable traits of an ideal process owner.

Next we look at how the performance and tuning process applies to each ...