I went looking for more information on the Workload Profile suggested values - 7x24 Steady, Growing, On Off, Predictable Bursting and Unpredictable Bursting - and the Data Advisor suggested I look in Help more information. Help suggested I look in Data Advisor for more information, so nicely circular.

I can come up with my own definitions of what these values mean but I would prefer to get something a little more official.

The way I look at workload profiles is a mechanism to categorise compute resources so that you can understand why you may see costs and utilization trends in certain ways. They are a great way to statr thinking about what resources you could virtualise, which ones you could move to a cloud service, and which ones may need to stay on a standalone device.

• 7x24 Steady: The server is on all the time and has a consistent CPU and memory utilisation profile. A sure candidate for virtualisation
• Growing: The cpu and memory utilisaiton are getting steadily higher. This is a candidate for virtualisation, but needs to be on a hypervisor with capacity
• On Off. Possibly a development machine. Ideal candidate for a cloud migration
• Predictable Bursting. Batch processing. Ideal candidate for a cloud migration
• Unpredictable Bursting. Batch processing. Ideal candidate for a cloud migration

Of course the next trick is how to set these categories. The first cut will always to get a sense from the server team and their tooling. However, if you are able to consume enough utilization data it would then be possible to have Apptio automatically create these categories which when then provide an extra level of insight to use in your report analysis.

Hope this helps

Michael

That's very helpful - thank you.