Defense Contractor Defeats SharePoint Issues with FactFinder
Steve (not his real name) was dealing with a major application problem. His recent promotion came with an ultimatum. Get the worldwide document management application to 1500 users in 60 days
FactFinder found that Documentum performance
issues were caused by another application
depleting SharePoint resources
Along with the promotion, Steve had inherited a virtualization conversion project for his company’s document management system – and application performance was terrible. The problems had been going on for weeks. Documentum users were experiencing slow requests when more than 250 users were in the system and the project was scheduled for rollout to 1500 users within 2 months.
“We had been struggling with this problem for weeks but BlueStripe found the issue in minutes.”
“We knew the basics of the system,” Steve commented. “IIS and SharePoint were the front end while Documentum handled the documents. But we didn’t know how any of it was really put together – and when Documentum requests startedslowing down, we didn’t know where to start.”
“We had every tool in existence, and none of them were helping. Finally, we called BlueStripe.”
Understanding the Application Systems
"Installing BlueStripe FactFinder was easy – and it didn’t take long before we started seeing performance reports for every component in the application system – even stuff we didn’t know was part of the application."
“There was no configuration. We just dropped FactFinder into our environment and in 30 minutes we had a full map of every single application running in the SharePoint environment and performance metrics for each transaction hop. It was the first time anybody had ever seen all the components that made up the project management systems.”
Case Highlights
Company Profile
- Fortune 100 Defense Contractor
- Large Scale Worldwide Projects
- Server Conversion for Consolidation
The Challenge
- Knock down obstacles to VM Roll-out
- Scale issues at 200 users
- Committed to reach 1500 users in 2 months
- Complex Environment with SharePoint, Documentum, and more
The Solution
- BlueStripe FactFinder installed across App System
- Found Documentum Performance Issue in minutes
- Isolated cause to SharePoint / SQL Server mis-configuration
- Confirmed Ability to scale to 1500 users once fixed
Finding the Problem
In minutes, FactFinder indicated the presence of bottlenecks – and their cause: a mis-configured connection between SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server (even though the problem manifested as slow Documentum requests).
“We were elated,” said Steve. “We had been struggling with this problem for weeks with no sign we were getting closer – and BlueStripe found the issue in minutes. Their full application system approach was the difference.”
Meeting the Scalability Goals
There was one other FactFinder goal Steve couldn’t live without.
"The Load Curves were awesome! They predicted the load where our next slow-down would occur, and we were able to proactively work other bottlenecks and scalability issues."
"There’s NO WAY we would have met our goals without BlueStripe, which would have been a shame, because our consolidation projects have saved us over $1M in operation and capital expenses."
