Yes, this is a common way to look performance. The nice is that it is easy to run all kinds of statistical checks and (visual) results when data is presented this way but, if the causes and results are not well understood, can also be very misleading. That's why it is often used by marketing, right numbers but wrong (misleading) conclusions!
The problem is that many of the measurement results are not independent - enhance one and something else or maybe the whole gets worse. This happens because performance management is seen too often equal to capacity management, which it isn't. Performance management is the tactical part of capacity management which is strategic. Only taking a larger (longer) view of performance can find a balanced view of performance problems.
Maybe that would be next good article?
Just reading the numbers doesn't help much when next holiday peek, end of quarter reports, new product or a moderately changed application, new storage array or even a new vendor software version kick in and by then it is too late to start analyzing why? That might work for social and gaming systems and networks but can be very bad for business. There is no magic in tools, expensive or not, the user must understand what they really want.