Software Performance Analytics in the Cloud

Kingsum Chow, Wanyi Zhu

Abstract: The emergence of large-scale software deployments in the cloud has led to several challenges: (1) measuring software performance in the data center, and (2) optimizing software for resource management. This tutorial addresses the two challenges by bringing the knowledge of software performance monitoring in the data center to the world of applying performance analytics. It introduces data transformations for software performance metrics. The transformations enable effective applications of analytics. This tutorial starts with software performance in the small and ends with applying analytics to software performance in the large. In software performance in the small, it summarizes performance tools, data collection and manual analysis. Then it describes monitoring tools that are helpful in performance analysis in the large. The tutorial will guide the audience in applying analytics to performance data obtained by common tools. This tutorial describes how to select analytical methods and what precautions should be taken to get effective results.