performance engineering business requirement

8/12/2019 Performance Engineering Business Requirement

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SETLabs BriefingsVOL 7 NO 1

2009

Is Performance EngineeringPrimarily a Business Issue?

By Bruno Calver

Maximize your ROI by entwining business

perspective into performance engineering

Performance engineering can be a timeconsuming, complex and costly activity.Projects can stumble on functional requirements

besides the usual fret over non-functional

requirements. In addition, clients are increasingly

finding the cost of stress testing tools and live like

test infrastructures prohibitive.

It is the joining up of business strategy,

priorities and operational practices at the outset

that will define the success of performance

engineering activities as much as the skill with

which they are executed. More importantly there

are other ways to address performance challenges

than a purely technical approach, like demand

management. It is all about understanding the

full range of options to ensure maximum return

on investment.

This paper draws on industry bestpractices such as the Information Technology

Infrastructure Library v.3 (ITIL) and research

from Forresterto help business clients navigate

their way through the various challenges that are

presented by service performance and business

expansion.

PERFORMANCE = CAPACITY

The first step in understanding performance

engineering is to look at the problem first from

a capacity, rather than traditional performance

engineering perspective. Assuming that a

service is built to specification, there is no

change in usage patterns and data is properly

archived, it is hard to imagine what performance

issues might arise in an operational context.

The point here is that it is the business that

changes and presents the challenge to service

performance.

Think of it like a bus service. If commuters

suddenly increase or change their scheduled

time of travel then the bus service might struggle

to accommodate all the passengers. This is a

capacity problem. The bus is just not big enough

however fast it goes. Providing more buses atpeak times is disproportionally expensive as the

overall utilization of the fleet is likely to fall, the

same is true of IT systems.

This indicates that the first step in

performance engineering is to understand the

business requirements. The key to the ongoing


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success of managing performance rests on how

well changes, or planned changes, in the business

are monitored, understood and communicated.

This operational bit is something that is often

missed and can present the greatest challenge.

This paper will focus on how business can

articulate its capacity requirements and

how it can manage its needs on an ongoing

basis in order to achieve the best return on

investment.

ITIL VERSION 3 AS A STARTING POINT

ITIL version 3 can help provide a foundation to

address the challenges already outlined. First,

the new lifecycle model introduced as part of

version 3 of the best practice guide addresses

both the initial gathering of requirements at a

strategic business level as well as the on-going

work required to monitor the service strategy.

Supporting the direction set by the business

is then delivered by the well established ITIL

process of capacity management, as was already

present in version 2, although updated and

fitted into the lifecycle model in version 3.

The goal of the capacity management

process is to ensure that cost-justifiable IT

capacity in all areas of IT always exists and is

matched to the current and future agreed needs

of the business, in a timely manner [1].

There are three sub-processes that are

worth mentioning that support the overall

capacity management process:

Business Capacity Management Takes

agreed business requirements and translatesthem into IT service requirements

Service Capacity Management

Focuses on the management, control and

forecasting of the end-to-end performance

and capacity of the operational service

Component Capacity Management

Looks at the performance and capacity of

individual technical components.

Figure 1 might help visualize where each

of these sub-processes fit into the overall picture

in a reasonably typical IT environment. Figure 1

shows that business capacity management sits at

the top of the hierarchy. If the direction taken by

the business is not properly defined, understood

and communicated then all of the other aspects

of capacity management are made that much

more difficult or indeed defunct. Given the fact

that capacity management is perceived to be an

extremely technical, complex and demanding

process [1] there is little room for making

mistakes in understanding the requirements, as

they are likely to be costly.

From an ITIL version 3 perspectiv e,

business capacity management derives its

requirements from service strategy and service

portfolio management, both being part of thefirst

stage of the service management lifecycle. These

sections provide some excellent guidance in their

own rights and will indeed generate many capacity

requirements. The question is how much to invest

in an ITIL based capacity management process?

THE BUSINESS FILTER

Thefirst step is for the business to determine the

criticality of any planned or existing service. This

sounds simple, but ask any business manager

if their service is the most important and their

first response is yes. How do you make sense

of all the yes responses that exist within theorganization? Application scoring mechanisms

give CIOs a rating mechanism that can help them

reallocate maintenance dollars to the highest-

priority applications while starving commodity

applications [2]. Such an approach can be

customized to the capacity management process.


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Application scoring is all about using a

objective method to prioritize and score service

in order to provide funding and resource to th

most critical and valuable IT services. There ar

four dimensions to the scoring system:

Business perspective

Application perspective

IT perspective

Vendor perspective

Score based questions in each of thes

categories in relation to capacity managemen

will help guide funding and effort levels allocate

to different services, particularly those that ar

already in operation.

The business perspective should assess th

criticality of the service to the business in factua

terms with queries like how much revenue is tie

to the service? Is it customer facing? How man

n

s

e

e

e

t

d

e

e

l

d

y

employees use the service? What is the impact

of delays or poor performance of the service on

business? A high score would mean that the service

is of critical importance to the business.

The application perspective looks at

some of the technical aspects of the service with

queries like how big is it? How easy is it to

scale? How complex is the service? How many

external dependencies does this application have

that affect performance or capacity? A high score

shows that the application or service is large,

technically complex and likely to be dependent

on a number of external services.

The IT perspective will capture concernslike what is the availability of skills to work on

the service? Does the service align to the ongoing

IT strategy? Is the platform stable? How easily

are technical issues resolved? A high score would

indicate that there is little internal capability to

manage and develop the service.

Figure 1: Capacity Management Process Map in Relationto IT Services

Source:Infosys Experience


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Finally, the vendor perspective should

focus on the roadmap for the service from the

suppliers perspective, particularly in the context

of off the shelf products. Vendor perspective will

address queries like is this a key service for

the vendor? Does the vendor provide a tried and

tested capacity roadmap? Do the future plans for

developing this product align with the business

needs? A high score would reflect poor vendor

support and roadmap alignment.

It is worth noting that low scores in the IT

and vendor dimensions not only suggest additional

focus is required in terms of capacity management,

but the solution needs to be seriously reconsidered

for projects at the point of inception.

The scoring system should be kept simple

and should align to the business priorities and

key technical questions vis--vis performance

and scalability issues. Each of the questions can

be weighted in order to enable the business and

technical teams to rank the relative importance of the

various questions. A 3-2-1-0 scoring mechanism is

advisable as it is simple and does not have a neutral

score and therefore forces a particular judgment.

The outcome of such an exercise will result

in a score against each dimension. The scores are

then combined to enable a matrix to be created as

per Figure 2.

The next stage is to develop some bands

of service that can be matched to the position a

given service resides within the matrix.

Figure 2: Capacity Management Scoring Matrix

Source:Infosys Research

PROVIDING A BANDED CAPACITY

MAANGEMENT PROCESS

Here it is worth referring to a seminal paper by

George I. Thompson Six Levels of Sophistication

for Capacity Management[3]. The author looks at

a variety of activities and approaches of capacity

management within an enterprise environment

and identifies different levels of maturity. This

paper also recognizes that business criteria is a key

factor in the most mature capacity management

processes.

For the purposes of this analysis it is best

to consider the application of just three of the six

levels proposed by George I. Thompson:

Level 1 Formally measure, trend and

forecast peak period utilization and

plan resource capacity with an on-going

periodic review program.

Level 3 Includes an automated workload

forecast system. Either looks at single

attributes or in an advanced form enables

forecasts by different categories.

Level 5 - Use business application criteria

with an application model to predictservice levels and forecast resource usage

requirements.

In line with Thompsons suggested levels it

is proposed that services that fall within quadrant

1 of the scoring matrix take the approach defined


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by level 5 to capacity management. Quadrants 2

and 3 should be managed using level 3 service.

Finally, quadrant 4 services should be managed

on the basis of level 1.

These levels should also be expanded in

two ways. The first is to include the type of test

infrastructure required to support each of the

services where the highest level will surely need

the most live like test platform. The second should

be to define the levels in terms of the ITIL version

3 capacity management process.

THE DEMAND SIDE OF CAPACITY

MANAGEMENT

So having looked predominantly at defining the

supply side of the capacity management equation

it is time to turn our attention to the demand side.

The supply-demand split is becoming a significant

trend within the IT industry [4].

One aspect of demand management is to

understand the incoming business need. When

the business does decide that they want to grow

or extend a function they need to consider how

they might best do this. IT is not always the most

cost effective solution.

This is where incentives and penalties to

influence consumption can assist in providing

economic capacity solutions. Figure 3 puts this

into context in relation to previous points.

Figure 3: The Service Demand Belt Source:ITIL version 3 Service Strategy

Crown copyright 2007 Reproduced under license from OGC

By introducing a financial aspect to the

consumption of services that accurately reflects

the additional cost of capacity, it creates a market

based system that makes sure that additional

capacity has equal or greater business value than

its cost. For example, the cost of capacity can be

varied according to the time of use and lower off-

peak charging can assist in utilizing an otherwise

unused capacity.

In addition, thresholds of capacity could

be determined so that capacity above a certain

level has a progressively higher marginal cost.

It is, however, critical that any such charging

model reflects the real cost of provision and is

transparent and fair, or else the costs and benefits

become distorted.

SOME WORDS OF CAUTION

It is important to understand the likely potholes

en route navigating your way along the capacity

management road, especially in terms of using

an application scoring approach as well as using

charging mechanisms to control demand. The

first and most significant issue is that an objective

approach to understanding and prioritizing


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applications and services can challenge the status

quo within an organization. This can lead to

strong political challenges and make designing

and deploying the framework a tricky affair as

it might disrupt traditional priorities and budget

structures.

Next is the challenge of implementing an

effective charging system. A full-fledged financial

management and chargeback system needs to be

in place for demand management to be effective.

As mentioned earlier, any charging system

needs to be perceived as fair. This is especially

troublesome where measuring the use of a service

or application by different business units or users

is difficult or impossible.

Finally, capacity management will need to

accurately predict the additional cost of capacity

and build this into the charging mechanism.

This in itself can be a significant effort or yield

inaccurate results that will affect any cost/benefit

analysis.

CONCLUSION

Understanding and managing how capacity

management is supplied and demanded is critical

to ensure the extraction of maximum value from

the process. This is not to distract from the highly

technical aspects of performance engineering,

but is to be seen as a crucial step to ensuring that

such activities are focused in the right areas and

for the right reasons.

Using ITIL version 3 as a foundation for

capacity management and bringing together

other frameworks to determine how it is to be

applied, offers organizations a powerful lens

to have a view of the landscape. This paper has

shown that performance engineering should

start as a business question and the subsequent

answers then lay the foundation for any technical

activity.

REFERENCES

1. ITIL version 3, Service Design, Office of

Government Commerce (OGC), UK, 2007.

Available at http://www.ogc.gov.uk/

guidance_itil_4899.asp

2. Phil Murphy, Laurie M Orlov and Lauren

Sessions, CIOs: Reduce Costs By Scoring

Applications Lower Maintenance Costs

And Change IT Demand Governance,

2007. Available on www.forrester.com

3. George I Thompson, Six Levels of

Sophistication for Capacity Management,

Computer Measurement Group, 2000.

Available on www.cmg.org.

4. Christopher Koch, Why IT Executives

Split Staffs to Create Supply, Handle

Demand for Technology Services, CIO,

2007. Available at http://www.cio.com/

article/print/121150.


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SETLabs 2009, Infosys Technologies Limited.

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Author Profile

BRUNO CALVER

Bruno Calver is a Consultant with Infosys Infrastructure Management Services, specifically part of the Process

Consulting Group. He can be reached at [email protected].

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