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Next Generation Siebel Monitoring: A Real World Customer Experience

An Oracle White Paper

June 2010



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


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


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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.”


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


June 2010

Author: Prasad Chitta

Contributing Authors: Dirk Zielinski, Gagan Chawla, Venkatesh Srinivasan

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