I originally posted this at http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/09/21/fisl13-the-use-method.
In July, Bryan Cantrill, Deirdré Straughan, and I spoke at FISL, one of the world's largest open software conferences, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I had a great time.
My talk introduced the USE Method: a simple strategy for performing a complete check of system performance health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This methodology can be used early in a performance investigation to quickly identify the most severe system performance issues, and is suitable for both enterprise and cloud computing environments. I've previously posted USE Method-derived checklists for Solaris- and Linux-based systems.
The video and slides are below, and a PDF version of the slides are here.