How do you respond to "It's slow"?

Just thought I would pick the brains of others in similar
situations....

I maintain several Sunfire systems; moslty 880s, a 480 and recently a
890. They all run Oracle databases, some of them have 30+ instances
on them ranging from 3g in size to 50g. Some of these are offsite (as
in, other side of the country) but our biggest and busiest are right
here in my local data center.

Occasionally, I get complaints forwarded to me along the lines of "It's
running slow". At first I was willing to do all the legwork, mostly
due to being new to the company and just wanting to do the best job I
can. Lately tho, it seems all it takes is for someone (anyone) to say
"Things were slow today, what's wrong with the server?" and this kicks
off all sorts of phone calls, meetings and general panic becuase "OMG
the server is dieing". Nobody seems to hear me when I point out all
of the variables involved: time of day, network connections, how busy
the box was at a given time, any "on the fly" changes the DBAs may have
made without telling anyone, offsite client connections, etc. As
far as I know, when something is "slow" it could be a client that has
their virus scanner running in the background so their queries don't
come back as quickly as expected. But nobody wants to be bothered with
that, all anyone wants to hear is what "magic" I can work on the
server(s) to make everything better.

How do y'all respond to this? There is a hard nosed side of me that
wants to say "Give me some concrete evidence, benchmarks and whatnot"
but I have gotten in trouble in the past acting like that, so there
must be some sort of happy medium here...

.

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