Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
QAD System Monitoring for Efficient
Operations
Derek Bradley – Performance Engineer, Architect, QAD
Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Safe Harbor Statement
The following is intended to outline QAD’s general
product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into
any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver
any material, code, functional capabilities, and
should not be relied upon in making purchasing
decisions. The development, release, and timing
of any features or functional capabilities
described for QAD’s products remains at the sole
discretion of QAD.
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Introduction
• This breakout session introduces best
practices in managing and monitoring QAD
systems – and how QAD can help
• Managing the technical infrastructure of
complex computer systems is a challenge
• The needs and expectations of the users
need to be balanced against the resources
and requirements of the IT management
team
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Aim / Audience
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Database administrators
Systems administrators
Technical project managers
IT management
Survey
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Best Practice Outcomes
• Keep the users and sponsors of the QAD
software installation happy and productive
- Up and down the supply chain
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Reliability
Performance
Visibility
Reporting
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Reliability
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Reliability
• Use Highly Available Architecture
- Along with well trained staff and good management
systems
• HA systems employ fault tolerance, automated
failure detection, recovery, testing, problem and
change management
• Duplicate everything.
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Eliminate single points of failure
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Reliability
High Availability Guidelines
• High Availability Systems have the following
technical design requirements
- Heartbeat monitoring
- Scripts or tools to start / stop / failover and
failback the QAD application
- Shared storage (SAN)
- Non−Corruption of data when the failover occurs
• After imaging / replication
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Reliability
Disaster Recovery Planning
• Disaster recovery planning (DRP) is essential
for any company
• Of companies that have had a major loss of
business data
- approximately 40% never re-open
- 50% close within 2 years
- fewer than 10% survive long term
(source : Hoffer, Jim. "Backing Up Business - Industry Trend or Event."
Health Management Technology, Jan 2001).
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Reliability
The Seven Tiers of Disaster Recovery
• Tier 0 : No offsite data
• Tier 1: Offsite backup but no “hot” site
• Tier 2: Offsite backup and “hot” site
• Tier 3: Electronic vaulting
• Tier 4: Point in time copies
- After imaging, disk flash copy
• Tier 5: transaction integrity
- OE replication, disk replication
• Tier 6: zero data loss
• Tier 7: completely automated
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Reliability
Disaster Recovery Objectives
• Working with the business, decide upon the
following objectives
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
• How long can you afford to be without your systems?
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• When it is recovered, how much data can you afford to
recreate?
- Degraded Operations Objective (DOO)
• What will be the impact on operations with fewer data
centers?
- Network Recovery Objective (NRO)
• How long to switch over the network?
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Performance
Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Performance
A Commonly Misunderstood Subject: What is
Performance?
Low System Requirements?
Responsiveness?
High Capacity?
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Performance
Roles and Responsibilities
• Users and IT support = application
responsiveness
• Database administrators = database
efficiency and potential bottlenecks
• Systems administrators and engineers =
server capacity and utilization
• IT managers = user productivity, system
availability, budgets and risk avoidance
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Performance
Typical Performance Problems
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Slow and unresponsive applications
Unexplained / random application freezes
Batch processes fail to complete (in time)
Lack of scalability
Lack of capacity
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Performance
Impact of Poor Performance
Forrester Research has reported that among companies
with revenue > $100 billion, nearly 85% reported
significant application performance degradation
Best Practices in Problem Management
Nearly 85% of applications are failing to meet and
sustain their performance requirements over time and
under increasing load
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems: Performance
Impact of Poor Performance
• Lost productivity
• Lost confidence and credibility
– Customers
– End users
• Lost revenue
• Low morale
• Financial penalties
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Performance Engineering Methodology
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Performance Engineering Methodology
How Do We Manage Performance?
• Establish performance objectives
• Identify critical requirements
• Define abnormal and normal conditions
– Service level agreements
• Create a baseline
• Continuous monitoring and alerting
– QAD monitoring framework
• Performance tuning
• Capacity planning and re-sizing
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Performance Engineering Methodology
Performance Objectives
• Unless performance is actively managed
and benchmarked, user performance
expectations are hard to quantify.
“The system is running slow.”
“It takes too long to log in.”
What do these mean? Can we determine
critical / objective requirements?
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Performance Engineering Methodology
Establish a Baseline
• Using KPIs and performance requirements
– Create a set of baseline measurements
– Capacity requirements planning &trending
• Load testing tools may help with creating a
baseline
– Apache Jmeter
– HP LoadRunner
• QAD Monitoring
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
QAD Monitoring
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Monitoring QAD Systems
QAD Monitoring
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Monitoring QAD Systems
QAD Monitoring
Ad Hoc Monitoring lacks transparency and can
lead to emergency performance escalations
• Continuous monitoring allows
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Advanced notice of developing problems
Trending against the baseline
Extra information to aid in problem solving
The ability to deliver KPI information to
management on demand
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Key Features
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Holistic system monitoring
Visual correlation of data
Visibility into system trends and usage
Ability to deliver KPI information on demand
Powerful warning and exception alerting
Reporting framework
Scalable / flexible
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Technical Features
• Non−intrusive, lightweight monitoring
• Technology agnostic
- Can monitor any component in the QAD
technology stack on any platform
- Any supported database technology
• In built wiki with full documentation
• Industry standard open source components
- Proprietary QAD integration pieces
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Graphing and Trending Features
• Allows graphing of numerical data for trending and
analysis
- Helps identify usage patterns and trends
• Enables visual correlation of data
- Data stored in time series (RRD) database
- Filter by time periods of 30m to 1 year
- Template driven deployment
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Alerting Features
• Whenever a pre-defined condition is met,
an alert can be sent to one or more
contacts
- Email / Pager / Twitter / Phone / Chat
- Warning, critical and unknown alert levels
• Recovery messages
- Time zones, rosters
• Escalation paths
- Template driven definitions
• Inheritance and overrides
- Stores service level agreement data for reporting
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Reporting and Service Level Agreements (SLA)
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Monitoring QAD Systems
Mobile Device Support
* 3rd party apps
** webapp on appliance
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Technology & Architecture
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Technology & Architecture
Deployment
• Deployed as a virtual appliance (Linux
VMware image)
- No Open Edge or commercially licensed
components installed
- ESX ready or VMware Server ready version
• Security to monitored systems
- Communicates with the monitored servers via
trusted SSH relationships
- Keys are stored on the VM and pushed to the
remote servers
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Technology & Architecture
Integration
• Technology agnostic:
- it does not care what is being monitoring
- the flexibility to monitor practically anything
- version independent
• Integration templates for:
- mapping to the QAD Architecture
- Tomcat, Open Edge / other databases,
Connection Manager, QAD business logic
- any supported Operating System*
- (Windows Support Currently Limited)
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Technology & Architecture
Availability
• On Demand customers
• Now
• 75 servers, 90+ environments, 2500+ services
• Early adopters
• June 2011
• General Release
• September 2011
• Staged rollout
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Technology & Architecture
Availability
• QAD Monitoring will be available to
customers who
- Are on current QAD Maintenance
- Who agree to a technical Q-Scan
• Establish baseline system health
• Tailor QAD Monitoring to their needs
• Training
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Metrics Affected
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Continued return on existing investment
Faster response times
Higher system availability
Problem avoidance
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Next Steps
• Stop by the EXPO to discuss what QAD
System Monitoring can do for your company
• Ask your account manager to arrange a
Q−Scan
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Managing and Monitoring QAD Systems
Questions & Answers
• Tony Winter (Chief Technology Officer):
tww@qad.com
• Paul Newton (Project Manager):
• Derek Bradley (Architect/Consultant):
pln@qad.com
dbb@qad.com
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www.qad.com
© QAD Inc
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