“We can’t log the data because it would affect system performance.”

How many times have you heard this statement?  Maybe you’ve said it yourself.  This is faulty thinking.  Challenge your team to find a way to capture system performance information without affecting system performance.  

Visibility to system performance trumps performance.

If you choose not to capture system performance measures for performance reasons, you’re crippling your organization’s system improvement capabilities.  Without visibility to performance data, you’re hiding critical system problems and improvement opportunities.

So stop using ‘performance’ as a false rationalization not to capture data.  Implement an efficient framework for capturing system performance information.

-Donny

Many changes never yield their expected improvements.  This chart shows the average daily cycle time for a key subprocess.  The subprocess is part of a complex system with a high level of variation in overall cycle time.  Because performance data on key subprocesses are captured and plotted, a configuration mistake made during a June 2 database upgrade was detected and corrected.  With this chart, it took almost two weeks to isolate the root cause.  Without this chart, the misconfiguration is an invisible anchor on system performance.