HP Caliper Advisor Rule Writer Guide

1 Overview: HP Caliper Advisor and Analysis Rules
This chapter provides a brief introduction to the HP Caliper Advisor and introduces
analysis rules.
The information in this chapter is a duplicate of some of the information in the chapter
“Using the HP Caliper Advisor” in the HP Caliper User Guide and is placed here for the
convenience of rule writers.
If you are already familiar with running the Advisor, you can skip ahead to “How the
HP Caliper Advisor Works” (p. 27).
For information about how to run the Advisor in the HP Caliper graphical user interface
(GUI), see the chapter “Using the HP Caliper Advisor in the GUI” in the HP Caliper
User Guide.
What Is the HP Caliper Advisor?
The HP Caliper Advisor is a rules-based expert system designed to provide guidance
about improving the performance of an application. It does not make any performance
measurements itself. Instead, it analyzes the data collected by previous HP Caliper
runs. It can answer questions such as:
• Where do I begin to understand my program's performance?
• What does a particular metric mean?
• What is the “normal” range for a particular performance metric?
• Which measurement(s) should I make next?
• I know that a particular performance problem is happening, and what can I do to
change it?
• I made a change, but did it really improve the performance of my application?
The Advisor analyzes individual executable programs. Future releases of HP Caliper
are expected to provide advice on system and shared library performance issues.
Steps in Using the Advisor
The Advisor is part of an iterative process of building, measuring, understanding, and
tuning an application's performance, as shown in Figure 1-1 “Steps in Using the
Advisor”.
What Is the HP Caliper Advisor? 13