T4 Special Topic Session at BootCamp - The Many Faces of T4

On Friday, May 18th, we assembled, at the last minute, a wide-ranging ensemble of mystery guest speakers for an all day, pre-bootcamp T4 special topics workshop. We were blessed to have a wide range of speakers who helped reveal the many faces of T4 and the many different ways it can be used and how it can be a helpful asset when carrying out important performance projects.

Speakers included:

• Hein van den Heuvel - showing the ways that he magnifies the out of the box capabilities of T4 through cleverly programmed use of DCL, PERL, and CSVPNG to take on a range of different customer problems.
  
• Kevin Jenkins - covering a wide range of examples showing step by step exactly how he has used T4 and TLViz to zoom in on the most challenging customer performance problems arriving at his desk in OpenVMS Sustaining Engineering.
• Tom Cafarella and Pat McConnell updated us on the latest developments for T4 V4.2 and TLViz.
  
• Colin Butcher gave us an advanced look at the Talk he is going to give at the upcoming CMG UK conference about how he approaches performance problems and then showed how he used T4 & TLViz to dig into the performance problems that he has face.

I thank all of these special mystery guest speakers for responding to the call for participation in this event at such short notice. Thanks also to the terrific group of attendees who had sped through the Porting to Integrity Workshop thereby freeing up their Friday for attendance at the T4 session. And of course, special thanks to Sue Skonetski for finding this additional venue for presenting this extra T4 material. There was just not enough time to fit all the T4 content and all the T4 speakers who were interested into the two half day slots that were already planned for the BootCamp week.

Rounding out the day and complementing the guest speaker presentations, I presented three segments:

• the first demonstrating the powerful new features that Pat McConnell has added to TLViz and in particular focusing on how these new features could save us time during analysis,
• the second laying out the case for why it is so useful to build new T4-style collectors and how easy it is to integrate such new data into the existing T4 framework, and
• the third wrapping up the day with a short talk on PAL - the performance audit litany - (which nicely complemented Colin's talk) and how the PAL approach could be used to to insure that we avail ourselves of proper and full context before we begin to dig into any T4 or other performance data we have collected.

If you missed out on this last minute event and want to learn more about the topics that were only covered that day, please drop me a line.

Extending the T4 Approach to New Territory

Here's the link to the second T4 related session (Extending-T4-beyond-OpenVMS) that I recently delivered at the Decus Conference in Nuremberg, Germany.

This session focused on what was required to extend the T4 approach beyond OpenVMS to deal with the complexity of other system elements. It included a partial listing of the more than 20 T4-style collectors that have already be created and showed the straightforward step by step approach required to build and benefit from even more new T4-style collectors.

The session also included answers to the question of why extending the T4 approach makes sense and pays off with radical time-saving and productivity enhancements and with much improved ability to integrate data from multiple sources to handle the most complex problems.

A highlight of this for me was the all too brief Put Me on the Spot portion that wrapped up the session by asking the attendees: what one performance challenge are you currently facing that's giving you a hard time? and then discussed specific ways in which the full range of the T4 approach might be brought to bear to uncover and visualize the currently invisible patterns that might hold the key to the solution.

We will be covering much of this material in the T4 sessions planned for the upcoming OpenVMS Technical Bootcamp in Nashua, NH, May 20th-25th. Hope to see you there. We've found that the best way to understand the T4 & Friends approach is to see it live and in action.

I invite you to bring your hardest problem and take a Put Us on the Spot challenge. Over the course of the Boot Camp week, there should be plenty of opportunity and time for the T4 team to to help you discover the ways that T4 can help you the most with your specific issues.

If you would like to get started early, you can contact me via email here.