How to perform Server Performance Audit [closed]

Question

Here is the situation. I am the CIO in my work place. The guy on the management team that get to take decision regarding Techy things. I dont do actual development, but we have an IT service provider that does this.

We have an internal web application we use for our internal process. The problem is the application does not perform at its best.

The application is web based and it runs on a Jboss installation and the DB is mysql

What i want to do is to make a request for a formal performance report from the IT service provider, so i can have an overview understanding of the architecture, how it is configured and maybe i can identify where we can make changes.

I have some indices i want to ask for, but am not sure the list is exhaustive. Right now this are the things i want to ask for:

1)Hardware specifications (Memory, processing speed, SWAP file size etc) 2)Details of how Application Server connects with DB server (i know this can affect performance but what exactly should i look for here? ) 3) Report on the present traffic i.e. how many requests to we have per sec etc

That is all. And i am not familiar with J2ee so i am not sure if i have the right questions :(

Please are there more questions to add to this list? General questions or ones specific to J2ee?

Your assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You are on the right track with the items you already mentioned. I'm curious however what the real motivation is. Are you expecting to diagnose the performance issues by looking at this data? Have you already asked them to investigate performance and they haven't responded (successfully)? Do you have customer complaints you are trying to resolve? Do you question the integrity of your IT provider?

If I were in this situation I would be more curious about what metrics they already monitor and what they already do when they exceed certain thresholds. Trying to figure out if their belief of success aligns with my own. It would also be useful to ask for what architectural documentation they already have for the application. I don't think you'll achieve much success by trying to get them to return specific data points to you.

Answer 2

Since databases can be very demanding on their disks, ask them to measure the IO/s and MB/s being requested by the server on the storage. Also, specify in your hardware component the number, speed, and type of disks the database lives on, as well as the raid level they're using.