Measuring Usage of Distributed Resources?

An Anonymous Coward writes "I work in a distributed development environment with some 1000 engineers running Solaris on different hardware platforms. We are initiating a project to move to a centralized environment. One of the biggest problems in this project is to identify the amount of resources (i.e.: RAM, disk space, etc) that the centralized environment should provide to the users. For example, each developer is currently building his code in a different desktop on the network. How could we effectively monitor how much resources are been consumed from each desktop during each build? If we find a way to capture this information, considering that the results were gathered from different hardware platforms, how could we normalize the data to get meaningful metrics that would help us define a solution?"

Comments

Test a smaller case?

[cperciva]

Given that software never works properly the first time, you're going to have to get the bugs worked out with a small group of developers before moving everyone over to this new system. Why not use that to your advantage? Measure the utilization of a box which has ten developers, multiply that by 500 (in order to give yourself a good safety margin), and that's what you need to buy before you move all 1000 people across.