Live Optics is Your Friend
Tue, 05 Oct 2021 19:01:57 -0000
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It’s a rare day that a free tool exists that can help profile customer workloads to the mutual benefit of all. Live Optics (previously DPack) is a gem in the rough that is truly a win-win proposition for customers and vendors such as Dell. I’ve been using it for years and found that it’s a rare day that I don’t learn something of use.
The tool is similar to SAR on steroids. Data is collected for each host. Hosts can be VMs. Servers can be from any manufacturer. The data collected is on IOPS (size and amount), memory usage, CPU usage and network activity. It can be run in local mode where the data doesn’t go anywhere else or it can be stored in a Dell private cloud. The later is more beneficial as it may be accessed by folks in many roles for various assessments. The data may also be mined to help Dell make better decisions of current and future products based on actual observed user profiles.
I use LiveOptics to profile database workloads like Greenplum and Vertica, Hadoop, NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Marklogic and more.
Upon inspection of the workload the data collected helps facilitate more meaningful discussions with various SMEs and to right size future designs. In one case I found a customer that was using less than half their memory during peak periods…so we suggested new server BOMs with much less memory as they didn’t need what they had.
Can we help you with assessing your workloads of interest on our servers or those of our competitors?
Some links of interest
- https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/live-optics/index.htm#pdf-overlay=//www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/solutions/business-solutions/briefs-summaries/cloud-live-optics-data-for-it-decisions-ebrochure.pdf
- https://www.liveoptics.com/
- https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/understand-your-it-environment-with-dell-live-optics/