My Slide Deck from ice:2011 (Wolkig mit Aussicht auf Fleischbällchen)

For those interested, find attached the slides I presented at ice:2011 in Lingen. Mind - they are in German! I also discontinue sharing the material via Amazon S3 as propagated in the slides.

Statistical Analysis of Performance Data Part 2 - Correcting the Data Set

In the first part of this series, I made a point that average values can be easily distorted and I explained when they can be considered to be secure. Now, I am going to show you how to clean up a data set using statistically proven methods.

The Performance Monitoring Poster

In the course of the last months, I have been working on a guide through the process of performance analysis. The poster introduces the individual subsystems and provides a step-by-step guide through important metrics and explains how to read the signs of a bottleneck. Read on for an excerpt from the poster.

Statistical Analysis of Performance Data Part 1 - Averages

In the first article about the statistical analysis of performance data, I will be dealing with averages. I will explain why it is a bad idea to work with averages of averages (like when storing intermediate results), why relying on averages can be dangerous and what good averages look like.

Statistical Analysis of Performance Data Part 0 - Primer

As I have announced a few weeks ago, this article kicks off a new series about analyzing performance data. The individual articles will discuss different aspects of correctly working with the collected data. They will provide the necessary mathematical and statistical background for processing and visualizing the data.

Reading EdgeSight Reports

In my series about custom reports for EdgeSight, you have learned about the database schema and the overall layout of a query against it as well as how the query is embedded in a report that can be displayed through the EdgeSight user interface. In all articles I have mentioned several times that reports are expressed in RDL – the report definition language which is based on the Extensible Markus Language (XML). In this posting, I’d like to take a closer look at a RDL file and provide some insight how a report is structured and what those tags mean.

Automatically Elevating a PowerShell Script

Lately, I have had the pleasure to spend quite some time coding in PowerShell. I don’t think I need to tell you how much fun this is. Some things require a new approach in PowerShell but once you get the hang of it …

In the course of this coding project, I have been looking for a way to detect whether a script is running elevated. In this article I will present a script header checking for administrative rights and – if necessary – spawning a new instance of the script which asks for elevation by UAC.

New Example SQL Query for Custom EdgeSight Reports

In my series about custom report for Citrix EdgeSight, I introduced a lengthy example query for system performance including standard constructs for filtering by time and department as well as machine groups. Now that we know about additional parameters for process categories and user groups, let’s have a look at an example SQL query.

Inside EdgeSight Report Parameters

In part 3 of my series about custom reports for Citrix EdgeSight, I have listed some parameters that are automagically recognized by EdgeSight. Those parameters cause EdgeSight to display specialized picker or pre-populated dropdown lists. But Citrix does not provide a current documentation for report parameters processed by EdgeSight. Therefore, it’s back to reading existing reports to discover those parameters. In this article, I will introduce some more parameters for EdgeSight reports and publish a report to examing values passed from the EdgeSight web-based console to the report.

Updated: User Profiles Whitepaper

I have just released an updated version of the whitepaper about user profiles. In addition to a general overview of user profile and the challenges involved in managing them, it now includes a section about profile migration.