Out of Band Performance Monitoring of Server Workloads
Scott Faasse, James Bucek, David A. Schmidt · 2020
Performance monitoring is a useful tool to leverage when additional insight is needed or warranted when evaluating the performance results of a compute solution or benchmark. More often it seems, the use of performance monitoring is an afterthought and is utilized only when unexpected results are encountered. Given that most methods for implementing performance monitoring require running additional applications or kernel code in parallel with the application or benchmark itself, it is understandable that there may be a bias against or a reluctance to leverage performance monitoring capabilities throughout the performance evaluation period as well as extending its use into a production environment. In our paper, we'll introduce a performance monitoring architecture that leverages an out of band (OOB) approach for measuring key server resource performance metrics. We will demonstrate that this approach has zero impact to the performance of the workload running on the server itself and is suitable for use in a production environment. Although the out of band approach inherently has limits to the amount of information that can be gathered for performance analysis, we will demonstrate the usefulness of the information that is available today in debugging performance related issues.