PERF02-01 Setting Performance Targets

Medium

Setting performance targets is crucial for optimizing workload performance efficiency. Performance targets define the required performance levels for workloads and help measure the effectiveness of achieving these targets. They offer a standard for measuring and comparing workload efficiency, helping you highlight improvement areas. These targets align your tasks with your organization's goals, boosting your business success. In addition, performance targets guide resource allocation, helping workloads adapt to different requirements while maintaining optimal performance.

• Set performance targets early

Performance targets are key for teams to continuously making improvements. Before service deployment, you need to check system requirements and expected goals and then set performance targets to ensure that the system can meet the reliability and performance requirements without any bottlenecks.

• Determine performance requirements
  Determine the maximum numbers of users and concurrent requests that meet your business goals.

  • Determine service performance metrics: These metrics include response time, throughput, and number of concurrent users. They must reflect the service requirements.

  • Prioritize services: Determine service priority by importance and urgency for performance testing and optimization.

  • Regularly review and update performance targets: Align your performance targets with new business goals.

• Identify key performance metrics

Key performance metrics help measure the status and performance of the workloads related to your business goals. Monitoring these metrics enables you to identify system bottlenecks, such as response time, throughput, and resource usage.

• Set specific targets

After determining key metrics, you need to set specific performance targets or thresholds for each metric. This helps you better monitor and manage performance and make optimizations to improve system performance and customer satisfaction.

For example, you can set the page loading time to no more than 5 seconds for a shopping website. If it takes longer, you can optimize image sizes and reduce HTTP requests to speed up the page loading.

• Document and expose performance targets

Meeting performance targets is an ongoing process that needs the development and operations teams to work together. The development team should consider and optimize performance factors during development. The operations team should constantly monitor and improve performance during operations. Document and expose performance targets to help these teams easily check the targets and understand and achieve the common ones they share.

• Evaluate customer feedback

Customer feedback is vital for all organizations. Value customer voice and satisfaction and use them to improve continuously. Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback to understand their needs and expectations. Use this feedback to set your technical standards and improve continuously. Adjust your performance targets based on customers' evolving needs and expectations.