FactFinder Solves Integrated PeopleSoft Application Issues

BlueStripe was contacted by the Technical Infrastructure Director of a county government in the Southeastern US. His organization was in the process of virtualizing servers, and at less than a year into the project, had reduced by half the number of physical servers in use. At the time of the organizations’ engagement with BlueStripe, they had 7 physical VM servers running 77 virtual guests. Cost-savings achieved at that stage was $125,000 for the first 77 virtual machines.

Business Challenge

The municipality uses the PeopleSoft Utility Billing Module for their Customer Information System. After virtualization, users complained that the app was performing slowly. Finger-pointing ensued at length; between app owners who believed the virtual infrastructure was the source of the performance problem, and the VM and Network Administrators who insisted the VM systems were running fine.

The organizations’ goal was to continue to virtualize the remaining servers. However their progress was slowed due to the PeopleSoft problem, prompting other app owners to resist their apps being placed on VMs.

The Technical Infrastructure Director knew he needed to isolate the problem, provide details for the cause, and propose solutions that would satisfy all stakeholders.

Technical Challenge

Tools available were industry standard system management solutions, which allowed the team to see how servers and VMs perform. These tools help in identifying network and hardware issues, but were unable to provide the detailed application performance issues that would enable problem determination for the team.

The IT environment includes IIS, Oracle databases, Exchange and PeopleSoft on Windows 2003. They use Virtual Center and vMotion, along with other capacity management tools. In addition, they have applications which are integrated with other county government agencies and are consolidating applications via virtualization – 8 apps to 1 to date.

The tools employed to manage the VMs and machines are sufficient, but the organization has searched for a true application-centric management tool that would show every connection to and from an application and how it is performing at the service-level. Additionally, their requirements include:

• Dependency mapping to understand of the shape and dependencies of the applications
• Performance stats to assist in troubleshooting; to see what is the app is connected to and how it is performing   
• Ability to see the transaction activity at a process level to determine performance quality, while providing performance details to defend problem identification and offer verification.

Resolution

“For a year and a half, I’ve been looking for something that could map the server networks for clients – from an application point-of-view....
...Within 15 minutes, I knew FactFinder was exactly what I was looking for.”
               - Technical Infrastructure Director

Within 15 minutes of seeing the FactFinder demo, he downloaded the product and installed it directly into his production environment. Moments later he had a real-time view of the problem application and all its connections.

FactFinder allowed him to benchmark performance and take a snapshot of the existing shape of his application infrastructure.

FactFinder enabled him to quickly triage the problem, clearly identifying the problem was not with the VI, but with the application. FactFinder also isolated a connection problem with an Oracle database. FactFinder automatically discovered and mapped the entire application infrastructure, highlighting process-level transactions and dependencies end-to-end, while capturing detailed performance metrics to measure the application health.

This level of insight allowed the TI Director to quickly recognize his applications’ core components across tiers, identify potential performance issues, and quickly triage problems - in real time.