Meta Research

We often talk about performance and capacity as one thing, and indeed they complement each other in a powerful balancing loop: higher capacity improves performance, decreased performance indicates insufficient capacity, which needs to be provisioned for. However, we often miss the fact that measurement and aggregation approaches that are used in performance monitoring are not always useful for capacity planning, while approaches that we use in capacity planning are often meaningless for performance analysis. This paper explores this gap and discusses ways to reconcile the two tasks.