Method to apply perturbation for resource bottleneck detection and capacity planning

A system for detecting resource bottleneck of a software entity, comprising:

• a processor;
• a module operable to execute on the processor and further operable to identify a resource type in a system executing the software entity, the module further operable to intentionally induce perturbation by varying the supply amount of the resource type in the system, the module further operable to measure performance of the software entity at multiple variation levels of the supply amount of the resource type in the system, the module further operable to model a relationship between the measured performance and the variation levels;
• and
• a bottleneck detector operable to apply the model to detect the resource bottleneck,
• wherein the perturbation comprises adding a packet delay to a set of outgoing packets in a network and at least one of reducing a processor speed, disabling one or more cores in a multi-core processor, increasing network latency, setting an input/output scheduling class and priority, controlling input/output bandwidth,
• wherein the identifying comprises identifying the multiple resource types, and the intentionally inducing comprises intentionally inducing the multiple perturbations to the multiple resource types simultaneously, wherein the model comprises a multi-dimensional model that incorporates the multiple resource types that are perturbed simultaneously,
• the bottleneck detector determining a response time of a candidate network without replacing a link in the network by executing the model with a negative extra packet delay, wherein the candidate network is faster than the network,
• the system scaled up using information from the detected resource bottleneck.