Virtualization Project Makes the Grade with FactFinder

One of the world’s fastest growing educational institutions is changing how adults get college degrees with online class delivery. Because of the school’s large geographically dispersed clientele, its CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application is critical to customer satisfaction.

FactFinder found that app issues
were caused by a poor performing database

The Situation

The school started a physical to virtual (P2V) conversion on their integrated, dynamic, 9-tier CRM application. During the conversion, IT was flooded with user complaints about application performance. Most of the complaints were attributed to virtualized applications, while unconverted physically hosted applications had no complaints.

The application performance issues were jeopardizing the entire consolidation project. That is when the school called BlueStripe.

Executive Summary

Company Profile

  • Fast Growing Educational Institution
  • Undertaking large P2V Conversion on critical 9-tier application
  • Experiencing performance issues with already converted applications
  • Conversion project in jeopardy

The Challenge

  • Quickly & accurately identify and map the application structure
  • Create performance comparison between virtual and physical environments
  • Isolate the cause of the performance issues to enable continuation of P2V Conversions

The Solution

  • BlueStripe FactFinder installed across App System
  • Showed no performance difference between physical and virtual environments
  • Slow response times mistakenly attributed to just virtual applications
  • Isolated the root cause of the slow downs to a poorly performing database
  • Operations team now able to trust their virtualized applications & proceed with conversion project

The Approach

The first objective was to get visibility into all application transactions to create a performance comparison between the physical and virtual environments. FactFinder immediately identified all instances of the CRM application, properly noting both the physical and virtual instances.

FactFinder automatically mapped all application systems. Application performance was measured and compared between the virtual and physical instances – including those that crossed virtual / physical boundaries.

The Findings

In minutes, FactFinder showed that there was no performance difference between the physical and virtual environments. The complaints of slow response time had been mistakenly attributed to just the virtual applications, but FactFinder showed that slowdowns occurred across all environments.

FactFinder also discovered that the cause of the performance issues was a poor performing database.  Thus, the operations team trusted their virtualized applications again and fixed their application performance issues.

The Results

Ultimately, performance was improved for all users, the number of complaints decreased, and Strayer resumed their virtualization conversion project.

  • Application performance improved
  • Database issue assigned to DBAs for improvement
  • Application problems were understood and correctly addressed