Correlation and Presentation
Once you have a simulated load of representative transactions running against your system and you have gathered runtime performance information from your application and application server, it is time to correlate that data and interpret what each metric means to your system's performance. The presentation of these metrics need only be as simple as plotting line graphs of one or more metrics at a time, but many of the commercial offerings provide very robust presentationsincluding graphical representations of call paths in trees and zooming capabilities. Many commercial offerings also provide preset views of runtime data that correlates different metrics that can be interpreted as a single indicator of a performance problem.
I will be dedicating significant time to the analysis and correlation of these metrics, the way the underlying subsystems operate, and how they affect your performance in subsequent articles.