System administrators have been managing the scarce resources of their computer systems in order to meet performance and capacity objectives using a variety of techniques. As mission critical applications grow increasingly data intensive, organizations have placed more and more emphasis on resource management.
Tools exist to help administrators understand resource utilization. Typically these tools address consumption of common resources such as processor utilization or storage utilization. Storage utilization is typically reported from a hardware perspective, for example as the percentage of a storage volume or device being used detailed perhaps by user or application.
In cases where the application, such as a database, manages its own information, little information is usually available to help the administrator understand how the large block of storage allocated to the application is being used. Typically, the file system allocates a block of storage to the application to manage and then no longer has knowledge of how that block is used. As such, little or no information relating the structure of the database to the physical aspects of the file system on which the database relies is available.
To further complicate matters, an administrator often needs to gather information from a number of systems and tally the results to understand global resource utilization. Such systems may be in a single location but are typically spread out across a wide geographic area, connected by a network.
It would therefore be highly desirable to have a method and software providing detailed information of resources used by applications across a network.