A systems administrator is tasked with investigating performance degradation on a web server that hosts a critical customer-facing application. Users have reported that the application becomes unresponsive during periods of high traffic. The administrator needs to determine if the server's current CPU and memory utilization are abnormal compared to typical high-traffic periods. Which of the following documentation artifacts is MOST useful for this analysis?
The correct answer is the server's performance baseline. A performance baseline is a documented set of metrics, such as CPU, memory, and network usage, captured during normal operations, including peak times. By comparing the current, degraded performance against this established baseline, an administrator can quickly identify which specific resources are behaving abnormally and pinpoint the source of the bottleneck.
The change management log is useful for identifying recent modifications to the server that could have caused the issue, but it does not provide the performance data needed to confirm a resource bottleneck. The service level agreement (SLA) defines the agreed-upon performance standards the service must meet, but it doesn't contain the detailed operational metrics of the server itself needed for troubleshooting. A network infrastructure diagram shows the layout of network components but offers no performance metrics.