Communications of the ACM

Home/Opinion/Articles/The Observer Effect/Abstract

Kode Vicious

The Observer Effect

By George V. Neville-Neil
Communications of the ACM, August 2017, Vol. 60 No. 8, Pages 29-30
10.1145/3108930
Comments

View as: Print Mobile App ACM Digital Library In the Digital Edition Share: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Hacker News Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook

The Observer Effect, illustration — Credit: Shutterstock.com

Dear KV,

The company I work for rolled out a new monitoring system one weekend, and it didn't go as well as we would have liked. When we first brought up the monitoring system, several of our servers started to show very high CPU load. Initially, we could not figure out why. The monitoring processes on each server were very busy, so we turned off the monitoring system and the servers got less busy. Eventually, we realized it was the number of polls being issued by the monitoring system that was causing the servers to use so much CPU time. We decreased the polling frequency to every 10 minutes, and this seemed to be the sweet spot for system performance. What I would like to know is how one should go about tuning such systems, as it seems still to be done via trial and error.

No entries found

Log in to Read the Full Article

Sign In

Sign in using your ACM Web Account username and password to access premium content if you are an ACM member, Communications subscriber or Digital Library subscriber.

Need Access?

Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.

Create a Web Account

If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.

Join the ACM

Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine

Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.

Purchase the Article

Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.