Is There a Doctor in the House?

One of the fun memories and experiences at SHARE was the VM Performance Project Performance Clinics. Each SHARE, we would have a 6pm session where people could bring in their VMMAP, VMPRF, Performance Toolkit, or ESAMAP listings (performance reports) for review. It was a fun and well done event. A few of us more experienced people (Barton, Marty, myself, and others) would play the role of the doctors. The 'patients' would come to the clinic and one of the other VMPR project members would do the triage, and direct people to the doctor that might specialize in their environment or performance tools. We would then go over the reports with them.

There were some patients who had real problems. Their systems were hurting in one way or another. In some cases, they were pretty sure what the problem was and just wanted some confirmation. In other cases, they didn't have any complaints, but were there mostly as a check-up. Occasionally one of us doctors would spot something abnormal. We'd go over what we saw with the customer. So in ways, it was like a teaching hospital. In fact, there were times other people came to the clinic and told us "I'm just here to observe.", and they would, with the patient's approval, sit in on the discussion. There were also times when I'd call in one of the the other doctors for consult. "Hey, have you ever seen pending time this high on an ESCON channel?" or "Do you remember the APAR where RACF wasn't releasing storage (memory) associated with virtual machines as they logged off?"

A couple of the patients would be repeat attenders. I don't recall any real hypochondriacs, but just people who liked the idea of someone looking over their systems. Often smaller shops where they didn't have other people to bounce ideas off. The most satisfying were the cases where the previous SHARE we had spotted a problem and prescribed a solution; and the customer came back to show us they had corrected the situation and everything now looked good.

Some of you don't believe that I'm actually a shy person, but I really can be. But what a wonderful ice breaker the performance clinic was. There's nothing like sitting down with someone and looking through performance data on their system to get to know one another. It gave us a topic of common interest. I would learn more about what people do with their systems, and they would sometimes learn more about VM performance.

We don't run the performance clinic anymore. The world is better connected so I can get listings at any time. From time to time, I will still look over performance data at SHARE. These days, with wireless and laptops, listings aren't required. You simply bring up your system and show it in real time.

At a couple of IBM Technical Conferences, we used the idea slightly differently. For those that registered early for the conference, they'd be eligible for a drawing for a free performance review by either myself or Barton Robinson of Velocity. We'd each get data from a different customer, analyze it, and put together a short presentation on the data and our findings as part of a session at the conference. It was a close to a shootout as we got.

At one of the SHAREs, Gretchen Thiele of 3M at the time, honored us doctors by presenting us with real stethoscopes. It was a prized possession on one of my bookshelves for many years, and a great conversation starter. Though some of my non-IT friends didn't understand the fun in looking at rows and rows of numbers. I would later donate the stethoscope to a friend who was in medical missions in Guatemala. But I still have this button to remind me of the Performance Clinic.