Performance Modeling has become increasingly important in the design, engineering and optimization of Information Technology (IT) infrastructures and applications. A modeling approach is particularly efficient in providing architects and engineers with qualitative and quantitative insights about the system under consideration. However, the modeling work itself is time consuming and requires a good knowledge of not only the system, but also modeling techniques. In this paper, we present a tool, AMBIENCE, aimed at automating the process of performance modeling and optimization of IT infrastructure and applications. AMBIENCE incorporates an innovative approach that integrates high-level queueing network models with advanced inference techniques. This approach uses system measurement data and end-to-end response time measurement data as input, and infers the queueing parameters of the system. In addition, AMBIENCE features a suite of powerful performance engineering functions, including predicting performance, optimizing existing IT infrastructure and suggesting cost-effective architecture designs through deployment and operations. AMBIENCE has been successfully used to analyze performance, quality of service and optimal design for a range of e-business infrastructures.
By: Zhen Liu, Cathy H. Xia, Petar Momcilovic, Li Zhang
Published in: RC22961 in 2003
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