RH442 Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning

Overview:

RH442 Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning is an advanced 4-day hands-on lab course covering system architecture, performance characteristics, monitoring, benchmarking, and network performance tuning.

Description:

Goal:
RH442 is designed to teach the methodology of performance tuning and capacity planning for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This class will cover: a discussion of system architecture with an emphasis on understanding the implications of system architecture on system performance, methods for testing the effects of performance adjustments (benchmarking), open source benchmarking utilities, methods for analyzing system performance and networking performance, tuning configurations for specific application loads. Where possible, emphasis will be placed on using tools that are provided as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network.

Audience:
RH442 is aimed at senior Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administrators and other IT professionals working in enterprise environments and mission-critical systems.

Prerequisites:
Participants in RH442 should already be familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Recommended minimum competency level is completion of the RHCE or equivalent knowledge.

What you will learn:

Principles of Tuning

• Developing a model for tuning
• Understanding tuning metrics

Tuning Mechanisms for the Linux kernel

• Using standard utilities to monitor system performance (vmstat,iostat,etc.)
• Using of the sysfs and proc filesystems to obtain information about your system
• Using the sysfs and proc filesystems to alter system behavior
• Generating reports using standard utilties

Monitoring systems

• Using SNMP to monitor systems
• Using Red Hat Network to monitor systems
• Using the netdump service to monitor system crashes

Performance characteristics of standard hardware devices

• Factors affecting memory performance
• Factors affecting disk performance

Process scheduling

• How the Linux kernel schedules processes
• Process priority
• Real time processes

Memory

• How the Linux kernel utilizes memory
• System tunables that affect memory performance
• How processes utilize memory
• How page and buffer caches work

Disk I/O

• How the disk I/O subsystem works
• Tuning the disk I/O subsystem
• How I/O scheduling works

Filesystem performance

• Filesystem layout and performance
• How journaling works

Network Performance

• Kernel tunables affecting network performance

Application Tuning Issues

• Problem areas when developing applications
• Measuring algorithm performance
• Viewing application behavior using standard utilities
• Using OProfile to monitor application and system performanceTuning for SMB/CIFS servers

Service specific tuning recommendations

• Tuning NFS
• Tuning HTTPD
• Tuning Samba

Important Note:

For developers or candidates with a strong programming background in C, we offer RHD236 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernal Internals. The focus of this course is gaining a better overall understanding of how the Linux kernel works. Attendees in this course will examine the actual code that comprises the Linux kernel. This course contains numerous challenging lab exercises that require the ability to both read and write C code.