performance monitoring and tuning class recommendations?

[Tim Mooney]

All-

I checked the archives for the past 18 months and didn't see anything
related to this, so I thought I would ask for some help.

I'm looking for any recommendations people have for good classes/training
for Linux performance monitoring and tuning.  A couple different companies
appear to offer a RH442 "Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance
Tuning" class.  Does anyone on the list have experience with that class?
It looks like Red Hat uses Unitek, but I see there is a least one other
company (Netwind Learning Center) that's also offering the same course.
Are either of those companies recommended (or to be avoided)?  Anyone
have a particularly positive experience with an instructor for that class,
so that I should try get the same instructor?

We have mainly RHEL here, a little 2.1 remaining but mostly 3-5 at this
point, so it's fine if the class is tailored toward Red Hat -- it's not
a requirement, though.  If there's another class out there that would be
better, I would love to know about it.

I'm not an RHCE, but I have 17 years of experience managing UNIX systems,
and a few years of experience managing Red Hat systems in a production
environment.  There are plenty of areas in system administration where
I'm strong, but I've never been particularly strong in the performance
monitoring and tuning area, and I would like to change that.

I'm also toying with the idea of going for RHD236 "Kernel Internals"
instead, since I'm a casual though comfortable C programmer, and a deeper
understanding of the Linux kernel would certainly be beneficial for
performance monitoring.

Feedback and recommendations would be much appreciated,

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                        Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
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