This morning, I did some work with Excel, and whether it was because I was in a relatively decent mood, or the stars were aligned, or what, it went pretty well.
I was looking at numbers from a performance reporting tool that gave measurements about how well certain things were running. There were about six different classifications of numbers, and each had about 72 measurements per day, and there were a total of five days worth of data. (Why do I feel like ending that with ...how many men were going to St. Ives?)
But I got it downloaded and dumped into Excel, plotted the values, and it told me something useful. In a way, I didn't need to -- it simply gave me a graphic image of something that I (and lots of other people) already expected (that this computer was seriously overloaded) but now I could see it; further, I could compare workloads (yes, the pain is mostly being felt by the least important workloads) and I could look at one workload over time. Performance and capacity people like this kind of thing, so I was having fun.
And unlike the last time, I didn't think 'gee, if this is fun, maybe I should do lots more of it!'. Okay, I did do one more days worth of data, and won out again: the chart clearly showed that although things were still tough on the machine, a change we'd made had had the effect of improving things for them.
I was pleased.
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