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Capacity Planning

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by tweaker73

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Our company's CIO is looking to develop a method to accurately determine the health of our current NT network, and the best ways to improve upon it with the least amount of capital. What ideas do you have to determine the health of servers (e.g.: using perf.mon stats)? What stats should be collected for each server, and how frequently? What are the warning levels for servers that are nearing their capacity limit, or conversely, are being under-utilized? Are there any tools you know of that can collect these stats and analyze them with minimal data manipulation? Any tools or ideas for determining capacity in an NT environment are greatly appreciated.

5 replies

by timthetoolman

Hi,

I used to do this myself... and spent a bit of time at it - as I used perfmon.

Whatever you do, I suggest you start collecting stats NOW. It's important to have baseline stats to compare to when you're experiencing problems that you believe could be performance related.

I'd go for baseline stats at a few intervals during the day and night and monitor for at least 15 mins. The frequency is up to you, but once a min should be ok.

Monitor everything. You cant have too much information here. Besides when it comes to analysing the info afterwards, you select the counters you want to look at...

A word of warning though, the files produced can get quite large quite quickly.

I'd do monitoring on a regular basis after that - again its up to you how frequently and the biggest issue will be the space to hold the files. Once per hour should be sufficient but not ALL night unless you're particularly interested in bandwidth usage during overnight backups?

Check how fast thefiles are growing and periodically move them off the system (ie. archive them) probably to CD.

Monitor the servers obviously but also pick a couple of clients - preferably in different areas network wise.

I'm sure there are tools available other than perfmon to do this and would be interested to hear experiences from other people too.

Hope this helps

Cheers,
Tim.

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