- What shape are my applications and servers in right now?
- Is the performance, usage, quality of my applications getting better or worse – how do things compare over time – what is the “trend”?
- How can we improve our applications so that we can significantly improve the general performance and quality – how can we ever measure this?
- Where do we stand from a hosting Service Level Agreement perspective – is my hoster providing me with the level of up-time which is in my contract?
- How often does my server restart & what was my actual uptime?
- What was happening on my server at 3:15 am, when it crashed this morning? – I want to be able to diagnose the issue.
- Show me how my applications and servers have been utilizing resources such as CPU and memory over the last week, month, year or however long I’d like to look back
- My software maintenance budget is limited, so I want to maximize the return on investment – show me which areas of my application I need to focus on so that I get measured improvements to performance and quality
- Which requests take the longest on average? – I want to focus refactoring on these requests so that the overall performance of my application improves.
- Which requests had the longest execution time on average? – I want to optimize my code so that I use less CPU processing.
- Which database queries returned the most rows? - I want to make sure that my queries are not returning more rows than are necessary, so that I optimize query time and data transfer.
- Which database queries returned the most data? – I want to make sure I’m only returning what we really need at the client.
- Which server events took place and exactly when those events took place across time? – I want to look for patterns as I believe something I have an intermittent problem which is causing instability on my server.
- What percentage utilization are we running our CPU and memory at? – I need hard facts to convince my boss that we need to invest in a new higher specification server so that we can improve response times for our customers.
The list goes on and on...
