UNIX Application Modeling

In the world of systems performance management, a resource consumption model is recognized as a fundamental tool in understanding the relative health health of a system today, and what impact future changes may have. Because of the interest in modeling as a system management tool many papers and books have been written describing the mathematics for creating a model. Almost as many papers have been dedicated to specific types of modeling methodologies and so called "generic" methodologies. For users of UNIX (and UNIX derivative) systems these papers fall short in dealing with what data is critical and how to gather it.