Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Performance Management

Performance management remains one of the key system management disciplines performed by systems professionals of all stripes. For instance, as a LAN administrator, you may be responsible for setting up the hardware platform and operating system environment used to run the applications that your company needs to run its business. The performance aspects of this job include monitoring the hardware and software and making configuration changes and tuning adjustments to make things run better. To support capacity planning and budgeting, you may be called upon to provide measurement data to cost-justify hardware expenditures and as input to the capacity planning process that is designed to ensure that adequate resources continue to be available.

In a capacity planning role, you may be responsible for assuring that adequate resources are available over the long term. This may mean monitoring the current growth, factoring in new application projects, and trying to plan the hardware configuration that can supply adequate performance. This inevitably means that you will encounter your company’s budget for new equipment purchases. You will be called upon to explain your recommendations in straightforward, nontechnical language. Perhaps your analysis will show that more hardware is needed to meet the performance objectives or else workers interacting with the system will not be fully productive. This is part of performance management, too.

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