Re: Metrics for Management

"Vince Laurent" <vlaurent_at_NOSPAM.networkusa.net> wrote in message news:b07ejukdsl01a6p2raioqa78krlloorqgi_at_4ax.com...
> On Thu, 18 Jul 2002 17:16:52 +0100, "Jonathan Lewis"
> <jonathan_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >Seriously, how about:
>
> Yeah.
> > number of users who phoned up to complain about
> > slow screen response times in last 24 hours
>
> All of them
>
> > number of users who phoned up to complain about
> > reports taking to long to run in last 24 hours.
>
> All of them
>

These metrics are right on the money though. There was an old saying I think attributable to a novell engineer that 'performance is a construct of the users expectations'. The performance you have on Jonathans metrics is terrible and your users and thus management *will* know this. However you can construct an action plan.

Identify what users think the response times should be *and why* . This will give you aims and objectives and a business case for expenditure that may be needed to meet the expectations.

Identify what screen X does and why it takes 5 minutes. see if it could be improved by altering the code or using oracle features/objects as appropriate (indexes, materialised views, clusters etc). test it out on your test system.

Look at your IO are you switching redo logs 5 times a minute.

Can you rewrite reports to run faster. can you change the approach so they don't run the same 5 minute report for all 365 cost centres but run one for all of them. Maybe long running reports that are needed by the sales force could be run over night and day old data could be presented instantly

> > Number of times process crashed with
> > 'maxextents' reached.
>
> 0 (whoo hooo!)

How many have added 10 extents in the last week? how many's next extent is larger than te free space in the tablespace?

Incidentally I'm sceptical of your answers to some of Jonathans points. users almost never say screen x is slow today they say "is the system slow?" sometimes they say i've had an oracle error though rare indeed is the user who can tell you what it says. Sometimes they say is the newtork down? when they actually mean the database server has restarted itself and now they just see 'shared memory realm not available' so it must be a network problem. ou almost certainly can't troubleshoot these calls - you cn fix the invoice run is taking 3 hours where it only used to take 10 minutes whats up?

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
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