Slide 2
Slide 2 text
Abstract
“In God we Trust, all others must bring data” is a quote usually attributed to the famous proponent of
data-driven decisions, William Edwards Deming. His unique viewpoint (c.1950) was that data analysis is
essential for achieving superior performance in all facets of manufacturing. Today, the SARS-COV-2 pandemic
has highlighted the importance of data-driven decisions in the effort to combat its devastating impact until a
vaccine becomes available. Deming’s approach, however, though necessary, is not sufficient. Put more bluntly,
how do I know the data you are bringing is any good? Early Covid-19 data was manipulated by the Chinese
government. Russia has since been accused of the same thing. But, even if the data have not been doctored,
that doesn’t mean you should treat data as sacrosanct — no matter the context. The illusion that data are divine
comes, in part, from the naive acceptance of the way measured values are reported. For example, a %cpu of
72.2, is commonly seen in various O/S performance tools. This pristine numerical representation gives the
illusion of a divine source: an illusion that is especially rampant in distributed performance monitoring
applications. In reality, data are devilish and thus need to be ‘waterboarded’ to extract the truth. In this talk, I’ll
show you how.
c 2020 Performance Dynamics Resolved: All Data Are Wrong April 11, 2020 2 / 37