If you're down in Southern California this week head to #Lisa12, the 26th Large Installation System Administration Conference, December 9-14th in San Diego, California. A variety of passes are available to join training programs, technical sessions, and workshops, or you can visit the vendor floor at no cost.

Our own Brendan Gregg, creator of the DTrace Tool Kit and co-author of the book DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD will be giving a talk entitled "Performance Analysis Methodology", Thursday 11 am in Grande Ballroom A.

"Performance analysis methodologies provide guidance, save time, and can find issues that are otherwise overlooked. Example issues include hardware bus saturation, lock contention, recoverable device errors, kernel scheduling issues, and unnecessary workloads. The talk will focus on the USE Method: a simple strategy for all staff for performing a complete check of system performance health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors. Other analysis methods discussed include workload characterization, drill-down analysis, and latency analysis, with example applications from enterprise and cloud computing. Don’t just reach for tools—use a method!" from usenix.org.