Capacity Management: Measure

When log data is stored over periods of times, it is possible to analyze daily, weekly, monthly and annual trends and to adjust Capacity Plans based on this analysis. Resources may be added or removed or rebalanced. Typically there are huge differences between average utilization and peak utilization and both should be recorded and taken into account.

Periodically, an effort should be undertaken to use utilization data to tune resources for optical performance. Using Log Intelligence reports you could for example:

  • Tune firewall performance by analyzing firewall policy utilization: firewall performance will improve if frequently used rules are moved to the top whereas unused rules are removed from the system
  • Tune file system performance by distributing frequently accessed files over different servers - or otherwise balance workload over various servers and applications
  • Balancing the number of access requests by VPN concentrators can improve the connection speed for individual users