FactFinder Triages Integrated Application Issues Between SharePoint and Documentum
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BlueStripe was contacted by an IT Systems Architect at one of the world’s largest aerospace and international defense contracting firms. The firm has multiple divisions spread around the globe, delivering large-scale government projects.
Business Challenge
The firm uses Microsoft SharePoint integrated to a back-end document management solution, Documentum. The solution was hitting performance issues at 250 users, yet it needed to scale to 1500 users in a couple of months. The Architect knew he needed to isolate the issues prior to rolling out the application to broader usage, but current tools didn’t provide the application visibility across the integrated apps, allowing him to see where bottlenecks were occurring. In short, he wanted to accomplish three things with this solution:
- Improve their mean time to application problem resolution by quickly isolating issues
- Perform deeper monitoring to avoid overpopulating their ESX Servers
- Ensure smooth P2V conversions by taking before and after snapshots of the application
Technical Challenge
Tools available were industry standard system management solutions, which allowed IT to see how servers and VMs were performing. This helps in identifying network and hardware issues, but didn’t provide the detailed application performance issues which would enable problem determination for his team. They have IIS, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint on Windows 2003, along with some additional apps running on JBoss. They are current DRS and VMotion users.
Executive Summary
Company Profile
- One of the largest aerospace and international defense contractors in the world
- Multiple divisions distributed globally
- Projects are overwhelmingly large-scale government contracts
Technical Challenge
- Using Microsoft Sharepoint, integrated with Documentum (document management solution)
- Obvious performance issues at 250 users
- Project needs to scale to more than 1500 users within 2 months
- Current tools were unable to isolate cause of performance problems
Resolution
Using Bluestripe's FactFinder, customer was able to:
- Quickly triage the source of the problem,
- Benchmark performance, before and after solution was implemented,
- Capture real-time snapshot of the healthy application for future performance monitoring
Download this Case Study (PDF)
IT is accustomed to seeing their infrastructure in terms of hardware; servers, routers, databases, etc. What was needed was an understanding of the shape of their integrated applications. What is it dependent upon? What is it connected to and how is it performing? Can I see the transaction level activity at a process level to determine performance levels?
Solution
FactFinder automatically discovers and maps the entire application infrastructure, highlighting process-level transactions and dependencies end-to-end, while capturing detailed performance metrics to measure the applications health. This level of insight enables application administrators to quickly recognize their application’s core components across tiers and identify potential performance issues and quickly triage problems when they arise.
Benefits
The firm found FactFinder, an Application Service Management solution that could deliver the details of their application infrastructure. FactFinder enabled him to quickly triage the current problem, while also allowing him to benchmark performance and take a snapshot of the existing shape of his application infrastructure.
“No other solution came close to providing the visibility we needed to resolve the performance issue we were facing. Without FactFinder, we struggled with tools we knew. With FactFinder, we gained a whole new level of understanding about our applications.”
