Performance baseline development for severs and networks

Performance Baseline Development for severs and Networks

Network performance baseline is made up of data and network metrics. The data and network metrics are used to define the normal working condition of a network infrastructure. There is no single standard approach for creating a performance baseline. All vendors have varied lists of monitors that a given device supports. Administrators should focus on the narrow subset of monitors that are available. Inventory of the network device to monitor are taken next. Physical and virtual devices should be considered in this step. After inventory taking, the next phase is analyzing the traffic flow across the network. The analysis indicates the health status of the network. Data capture or sniffing tools can be used to monitor the stream of network data.
Also, other protocols such as sFlow or NetFlow can be alternatively be used to capture the data stream. The two are less storage intensive compared to sniffing tools. The administrators can see trends in application usage by performing packet analysis. The trends will help in assigning the percentage of utilization for each application in reference to total network usage. Finally, the monitors are left to run and gather points of data. The most preferred time to be allocated is about seven days. The seven days will allow effective and accurate monitoring of window and thus the determination of performance trends. A baseline for each data metrics is then set. The ranges that were obtained will determine the network performance baseline. (Tomsho, G. 2009, pg. 143)
Some windows programs and tools can be used to gather the information that can be used to create the baseline. These include the Windows Forensics Toolkit (WFT) and the KDiff. WTF is an analysis tool developed by McDougal. It can be used to collect data. It is done by using the command “ wft-fetchtools”. The KDiff is a comparative analysis tool. KDifff accepts both a baseline file and an updated file; it evaluates and determine the differences between the two versions of files.
Reference
Tomsho, G. (2009). MCTS Guide to Configuring Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Active Directory (Exam #70-640). New York, NY: Cengage Learning.