Graybar Tracks Application Performance With Precise Tool

In late August, the IT group at Graybar was getting calls about slow performance from its users accessing the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. So the IT team fired up an application performance management solution last week from Precise Software to determine the cause of the trouble.

Graybar is a $5 billion provider of components, equipment and materials as well as supply chain management services for the electrical and telecommunications industries. Its core business processes run on a suite of SAP applications, including the SAP ERP Central Component version 6.0 (ECC 6), SAP Portal, as well as applications from SAP for human resources and supply chain management. The company is going live with SAP's customer relationship management (CRM) solution this month. Because Graybar's business depends on the SAP systems, it is critical to monitor and measure response times and other performance metrics, with the ability to map historical trends and also quickly identify the source of any trouble.

When the users experiencing the recent problems contacted Graybar's help desk, they couldn't pinpoint the problem, explains Joe Bobarsky, manager of SAP services for Graybar. So the help desk turned to Bobarsky's IT group. "The problem was somewhat puzzling. We didn't any see one indicator where there are problems, but we did see certain steps in the transactions where there might be problems," Bobarsky says.

Using Precise Software's Transaction Performance Management (TPM) for SAP production environments, the team is able to track business transactions across the SAP ECC 6 system to identify performance trends, troubleshoot and ultimately resolve the issues. Precise for SAP lets IT track performance of transactions by user, with the ability to drill down and measure response times for the past several days or even weeks.

"On SAP ECC 6, we are running a variety of transactions, and the users were claiming long 'hour-glassing' indicating wait times in the transaction. It could be the database time, a spinning processor time, it could be the network," Bobarsky says.Turns out, the problem wasn't with the SAP application. "The Precise tool helped confirm my suspicions that this was a networking issue and not a SAP application problem," Bobarsky says, adding that because some users were also reporting disconnects he initially thought there may be a networking issue, even before drilling into the Precise tool. "Select users who were experiencing the problem reflected high client times in relation to the database and work time as reported by the Precise tool. I was able to use this data to help report to our Network Operations that the problem was most likely not SAP."

The Precise tool augments the monitoring and management capabilities inherent in the SAP system. The tool allows Bobarsky and his team to quickly and easily investigate problems as they come up, through a series of drill-downs. SAP has a number of tools but none provide the historical detail that helps the team monitor and improve performance--which, without such historical trending capability, might be solved by simply throwing more hardware at the problem. "You need historical data to compare to, to go back and capture some of the data. One of things Precise does is collect over data course of 30 days--you can aggregate even beyond that--and you can go back and find issues with response times that SAP no longer has tracked," he says.

The tool can help, for example, determine if a transaction is spinning in the database. "Then, we can drill into the database to look at the SQL statements then drill into components of Oracle and do some historical analysis," Bobarsky says. "That helps us determine if the problem is because of something new that we did, such as a new database index, or if there is something that has always been there but because of another change we've made is now not working."

This month, Bobarsky and his team hope to get to the newest version of the Precise tool (Precise TPM 8.7 for SAP), which includes such capabilities and integration with SAP's Solution Manager and the ability to isolate performance issues wherever they exist such as in SAP Business Warehouse, the SAP portal, etc. The tool also comes with a new user interface designed to help customers more easily identify and isolate performance issues.

One of the new features Bobarsky is excited about is the tool's ability to measure response times as averages and as individual steps within a complete transaction. Until now, the team had to drill inot the SAP monitoring tool to get average response times. Now they will be able to get both measurements from a single source--the Precise tool.