Scaling for E-Business

12.7. Concluding Remarks

Workload forecasting is a key issue for preparing e-business sites for waves of demand. Forecasting is useful in many ways. It helps system administrators and capacity planners anticipate performance and operation problems and prepare alternative plans to support surges in customer demands. The basic steps to a workload and demand forecasting are:

• Analyzing customer demand variations,

• Understanding the patterns of e-business traffic,

• Evaluating peak-to-average ratio,

• Performing a qualitative-oriented forecasting,

• Selecting the demand and workload parameters to be forecast,

• Analyzing historical data,

• Selecting a forecasting technique,

• Applying the forecasting technique to the historical data,

• Calibrating forecast results,

• Analyzing ...