Diagnosing application performance degradations without server access

Diagnosing application performance without server access has traditionally been a major challenge. This article explores how SkyLIGHT PVX (formerly PerformanceVision) helps to diagnose application performance when you don’t have immediate access to the underlying servers.

Diagnosing application performance: a concrete case with SkyLIGHT PVX

An application that is not responding properly, unhappy users, and wasted productivity. Does this sound familiar?

The case that we will be discussing here pertains to one of our customers from the Hospital sector. In this particular hospital, two departments heads, the doctors, and the nurses were using one specific application and were unhappy with the response time they were experiencing, which was often very long.

To quote one of the users: “Do you really think that I have nothing else to do besides wait for this darn application to respond?”.

In addition to the feeling of deep anger raised by the users, the financial impact for the hospital was considerable.

Between 10 and 15 minutes were lost every day, multiplied by the number of users, plus the time spent in unproductive meetings with suppliers. Also, not to forget, the time spent internally searching for the IT teams, who were already overloaded with other problems. In total, the cost was evaluated to tens of thousands of euros per month of lost productivity.

The human aspect of performance degradations

One must also consider the human impact, as a patient, do you really want to deal with a doctor who’s annoyed because he has an IT problem?

After a very vociferous meeting, a top management member slammed his fist on the table leading to a team leader to be designated to find a solution, and fast! Unfortunately, he was not a network administrator, nor a developer, nor a database administrator. He had no login authorizations, no logs, teams that were very unwilling to collaborate because they were already busy elsewhere. In short, and in normal times, it would become hard to find the source of the problem, and as a matter of fact, the problem had been going on for several months by now.

Fortunately, due to various performance problems, the organization had just invested in an NAPM (Network and Application Performance Management) tool. And as a matter of fact, SkyLIGHT PVX had therefore just been installed, allowing our solution to find the problem that had been going on for several weeks, it was able to precisely address and diagnose it in just a matter of minutes.

SkyLIGHT PVX works by listening and analyzing all of the network and application transactions traffic in real time. There is no impact on the existing infrastructure. No agent to install, whether directly on the server side nor on the customer’s terminals.SkyLIGHT PVX enables you to analyze all of the operations that are conducted by users, as well as knowing the performance experienced by them, and the elements that influence performance.

This is the analysis protocol that was launched by the customer:

1. Check the performance of the applications in question
2. Verify that the network is not to be blamed
3. Access the users’ operations details
4. Check the database performance
5. Access the details of the SQL requests
6. Identify the slow SQL requests

Figure 1: Analysis protocol