Capacity planning is an important part of the work that Systems Administrators perform on a regular basis. The knowledge about the current utilization levels becomes indispensable to predict when the next hardware upgrade will be needed. Moodss (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet) is a free tool for collecting data from different systems and making it readily available for analysis.
I have used other products to do predictive systems performance analysis using models of different CPU’s, eg “what if we upgrade from 4 x 800mhz cpu’s to 6 1ghz cpu’s, how will that affect the workloads that we are observing now” etc…Can this product do any of that for you?
What other modeling software is there out there?
Actually, the one I have some experience with is BMC Patrol “perform and predict” it’s a pretty nice tool. It uses performance and system workload data collected by your standard patrol agent, and then you can model the effects of different changes such as faster storage i/o, faster cpu, more cpu’s, more memory etc. and it will model what the same workload will look like after the changes are made to the system.
It actually does analysis down to building a model of the transactions for a particular applications and models how that application behavies as far as cpu, doing io, threads, etc to build a model of what a transaction is and how the different peices of your system impact the performance of that applications work.
Having something like that in opensource would be darn skippy to play with.
This tool may have good capabilities. But unless the makers of it learn how to create a few simple, clean web pages, it will never matter.