Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World Customer Experience Page 2
Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World Customer Experience
Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3
The Business Problem ...................................................................................... 3
The Enterprise Manager Solution ................................................................... 4
RUEI Configuration ..................................................................................... 4
Details of RUEI Hardware ..................................................................... 4
RUEI collector and Network Location ................................................. 5
RUEI Reporter Configuration ................................................................ 6
Siebel AMP Configuration ........................................................................... 7
Discover Siebel Targets ........................................................................... 7
Use-Case: Step by Step Performance Management ...................................... 9
Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 13
References ......................................................................................................... 14
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Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World
Customer Experience
INTRODUCTION
This technical white paper aims to provide a real life case study of achieving a
superior insight into production Siebel CRM Applications using Oracle Enterprise
Manager. This case study covers Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) and
Siebel Application Management Pack (AMP) implementation details at a large
retail company and also highlights a real life use-case flow of quickly diagnosing,
fixing and validating the performance issues with Siebel implementation using
Enterprise Manager.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
The customer is in the process of implementing a Siebel CRM system that covers
various countries for critical business processes. Customer’s operations,
development and testing teams are engaged in this production worldwide Siebel
implementation. The challenges for the implementation teams are:
1. To get a superior insight into what happens at the end-users who use the
Siebel applications and quickly identify and fix the problems that impact
the end-users on the production environment. This challenge has two
distinct requirements:
a. How an end-user of the application “feels” about the application
performance that is deployed in production.
b. Measure and enforce the SLA compliance and guarantee an
agreed “response time” to the end-users.
2. Providing development team with correct information and details of the
actual event to diagnose and fix the problems in effective, timely manner.
Next Generation Siebel Monitoring is here!
As the production Siebel CRM application
configuration is complex and involves
many components and layers, gaining a
superior insight is the Key for success in
implementing and managing the Siebel
CRM
Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World Customer Experience Page 4
THE ENTERPRISE MANAGER SOLUTION
Siebel Application Management Pack and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI)
were chosen to be implemented to provide an end to end top down management
of the Siebel CRM infrastructure to meet the above mentioned challenges.
RUEI provides an insight into the real time end user performance of Siebel CRM
applications and the Application Management Pack gives the capabilities of
monitoring and managing the Siebel components and overall infrastructure.
Rest of this paper explains detailed steps in implementing the proposed solution
with some screen shots taken from the production environment at the customer
site.
Architecture Diagram – EM, Siebel and RUEI
RUEI Configuration
RUEI can be configured with multiple nodes that are acting as collectors from
different network points and all collectors nodes sending the collected network
protocol analysis data to a reporter machine. Considering the requirement at the
customer environment a single collector + reporter system is configured with
RUEI 6.0.1 on the following hardware configuration.
Details of RUEI Hardware
48 GB memory with 2Quad Core Intel Xeon processors
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400GB disk storage
300GB for Database and 100GB for RUEI_DATA
2 NICs (fiber channel) for the collection of network traffic (sniffing)
1 NIC for web access and reporting
This machine is planned to monitor few more application along with the Siebel
CRM suits. The RUEI installation has been upgraded to RUEI 6.5 after initial
implementation of 6.0.1
RUEI collector and Network Location
When implementing the RUEI system it is important to choose the correct
location on which the RUEI collector listens to the network traffic.
At the present customer scenario, the following configuration is used:
SPAN port on core switch that routes to the load balancer with a filter of copy
only load balancer traffic.
Primary and standby core switch SPAN ports are connected to the collector
machine.
This shows the traffic being collected by both the interfaces of RUEI collector
from the primary and standby switches. Eth0 is collecting from standby and eth1 is
collecting from the primary switch.
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RUEI Reporter Configuration
The Siebel production system serves multiple countries. In RUEI the suite
definition is done for each country as follows:
Each country is defined as a different suite in RUEI based on the “Find URL”
suite identification.
The configuration (for each country) like:
Above suite definition is for P01DE suite, the same configuration is done for other
countries.
KPIs are defined as to be seen in this overview:
As per the customer’s needs, they were able to configure the main dashboard with
the required KPIs. The key metrics used were the overall end to end page loading
time, concurrent sessions, failed page views and URLs.
This configuration leads to the following dashboard view:
Oracle Real User Experience Insight
Accelerator for Siebel provides an out-of-
box real user monitoring solution for Siebel
that automatically discovers Siebel CRM
Applications and translates network
objects into manageable business services
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Siebel AMP Configuration
Siebel AMP comes part of Enterprise Manager Grid Control. Customers just need
to apply the mandatory patches on the OMS and the Monitoring Agents to get
ready for discovering the Siebel targets in the Enterprise Manager.
Following patches are the mandatory requirement on EM 10.2.0.5:
Agent Patch 8745318
Agent Patch 8640973
OMS Patch 8838440
Discover Siebel Targets
Customer has discovered all the Siebel suites in the EM Console.
Production, System testing and development instance of Siebel Enterprise are
discovered in the EM for regular monitoring and management of the end-to-end
infrastructure.
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While the development and test Siebel servers are running on single host with one
gateway server and one Siebel server, the System testing and Production servers
have multiple object manager servers involved. The Siebel AMP homepage after
the required targets discovered looks like the following:
Standard EM functionality of monitoring the required metrics and storing the
information in the repository and the capabilities to submit jobs and other
automation help the regular monitoring of the Siebel Targets.
The “Update Now” button on the Siebel Suite home page is useful to get the
updated topology information when the customer added further Siebel Object
Manager servers to the topology.
Siebel Targets are modeled in Enterprise
Manager to reflect the Siebel Topology. The
Siebel system consists of multiple
components making up the system. The
dashboard functionality gives a single page
view of overall system health.
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USE-CASE: STEP BY STEP PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
This section will show a step by step use case how the tools RUEI and Siebel
AMP are used in quickly identifying the performance issues and communicated to
the different groups.
First check the page loading time satisfaction of an application.
The small red bar shows the page views beyond the acceptable limit hence they are
frustrating page views. Drill down in application, that’s the interesting eretail
(P01DE) in the above example.
Real User Experience Insight combined
with Siebel Application Management Pack
provides unique capabilities for real time
performance monitoring of Siebel
Applications right from End user till
Application down till Infrastructure layer
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After making a note of the page, switch to Session Diagnostics to find the sessions:
Then select the user with the problems:
At this point the customers can easily pin-point the session and session start time
along with the user who is having the problem.
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Now, switch to the Siebel AMP to identify the exact task id and the log file for
further analysis. The username in this case is the same user identified from
previous RUEI screen.
By clicking on the log file, the log contents can be viewed from the EM console,
and the log file name and other information can be shared with the Customer
development teams for quickly fixing the problem.
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Customer’s development team used the information provided by the operations
team and identifies the actual issue with the Siebel implementation that is causing
the performance issue.
By increasing certain Siebel log levels (e.g., EventContext=4, ObjMgrSqlLog=4)
the SQLs generated in the frustrating views could be found.
EventContext shows the Screen and View names the user accessed.
ObjMgrSqlLog shows the SQL(s) executed including bind variables.
Searching in the log file for the view names found in RUEI and checking the SQLs
executed afterwards, the SQL(s) running too long could be identified.
By tuning these SQLs, either using new indexes or changing the configuration of
the application, the application was tuned to remove the frustrating views.
In other cases SARM was used to analyze where the time was spent in the view. It
was determined that Workflows called synchronous in the Object Manager took
very long to process data. By changing the configuration of these Workflows or
calling the asynchronous while the user could proceed on working with the
application. Therefore the business process needed to be redesigned.
Once the relevant fix is identified, and tested on the dev/test environments the fix
was applied on the production. The RUEI dashboard reflects the changes
immediately. We get the page loading satisfaction back into the acceptable range by
removing the frustrated page views.
The Siebel implementation team finds the
Enterprise Manager information provided
by operations team very useful
The implementation team could identify and
fix the problem quickly using Enterprise
Manager
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CONCLUSION
Customers can achieve a superior insight into Siebel CRM monitoring and get a
superior ownership experience using combined capabilities of Real User
Experience Insight and Siebel Application Management Pack.
A quote from this Customer who provided this real life case study:
“We use RUEI on technical administration to get information, how the application “feels” on customer side and for management point of view to get the information of SLA agreements in fact of guaranteeing a dedicated response time to our customers. We verify the SLA with RUEI KPIs which are implemented in a management dashboard.”
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REFERENCES
1) Real User Experience Insight Webpage on OTN:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/realuserexperienceinsight.html
2) Application Management Webpage on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/prod_focus/app_mgmt.html
3) Achieving a Superior Ownership Experience in Manageability and Quality for Siebel CRM: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/pdf/achieving%20a%20superior%20ownership%20experience%20for%20siebel%20crm.pdf
4) Monitoring the Real User Experience of Oracle Siebel Users http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/pdf/twp_ruei-monitoring_siebel_users.pdf
5) Application Performance Management Webpage on Oracle.com: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-manager/application-performance-management/index.html
Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World Customer Experience
June 2010
Author: Prasad Chitta
Contributing Authors: Dirk Zielinski, Gagan Chawla, Venkatesh Srinivasan
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