Documenting Bottlenecks
Get your users involved in the Performance Tuning Process
Posted on 5/11/2007
by Nitin Pai
How often have you received a call from your user with the description of the performance problem as 'The whole system is slow!!'? Tackling user expectations and determining the root cause for the performance problems are some of the key responsibilities assigned to the PS DBA. However, a problem description stated above should not be the starting point to look for the needle in the performance problem haystack.
As a PeopleSoft + Oracle DBA, I used to spend lot of efforts communicating back and forth with the user to determine the true source and nature of the performance problem. This resulted in unproductive time spent by both me and the user thus delaying the arrival to a solution to the problem. Performance problems tend to have a “domino effect”. The more you delay resolving the problem the more users are impacted.
In this article, I will talk about the process I implemented to provide a quick turnaround to performance problem tickets and to have a clear vision of the performance problem faced by the user.
Some users will be more descriptive in logging the performance problems and will add their two cents to help you understand the problem. All this information though useful is not the optimal approach to start looking at a performance problem in a consistent and productive way. We all know how busy DBA life is!!! And we cannot afford to spend non-productive hours.
The solution I built was two-fold.
1. Creation of a process document that will provide a constructive start in my quest to free the user from the clutches of inefficient response times
2. It meant educating the helpdesk and/or Customer Care who are the first line of contact for the users.
We all know the common reaction from the user community for a “CHANGE”. I got a first-hand feel of that when I created a “Performance Tuning Packet” process document that was initially greeted with skepticism. But when the users noticed the benefits and quicker turnaround times, they were more positive towards the change.
So what were the contents of the “Performance Tuning Packet”? The document doubled up as a Change Control process document and hence the first section had the common language that is spoken in most of standard Change Control documents i.e. Problem Ticket number, Requestor name, Assigned To, Approver, Date, Priority, Business Impact, etc. The second section was the core reason for the existence of this document. It was the “User Questionnaire”. Here I had the questions that I would ask if I wanted to understand the problem. Table 1 below lists the questionnaire.
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