Infosys runs 150+ web based custom applications to support its internal
functioning. This includes a heady mix of J2EE, .NET, ASP and SQL 2005-based
applications. As can be imagined, managing the performance of so many
applications is a major challenge. This project has been specifically deployed
for the application development teams working within the Information Systems
division to ensure smooth functioning of these applications.
The case for a pro-active approach
With each passing year the complexity of Infosys business has been steadily
increasing with the addition of new subsidiaries, special services, and new
acquisitions. This puts additional pressure on the Information Systems division
and there is constant challenge for scaling up its applications while committing
on the required quality of services to end users. This means they need to
eventually ensure flawless quality during production.
The organization decided to catch hold of the horse before it bolted. They
adopted the proactive monitoring and detection of performance defects early
during the evolution of a Web application. For instance, they would look at long
running queries within applications that would cause slow page responses. They
would also check for relativity amongst procedure calls to ensure an optimally
written code was used and there was no unnecessary lag because of this issue.
Such an approach also set into motion a governance framework for performance
risk analysis and remediation for all enterprise Web applications, and cause
isolation of problematic applications from a shared environment. This system
provides a relevant information for troubleshooting and debugging of various
applications.
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What was deployed
The solution enables automatic collection, analysis and correlation of
various performance metrics from the production environments and acts as a
gateway to take proactive measures, and to build a good closed-loop governance
mechanism. The solution automatically detects the performance defects using ADDS
engine, which raises a performance defect in an Enterprise Project Management
System, sending early warning of the performance incidents and an escalation
mail to delivery managers and the practice unit head if the defects were not
closed within the defined threshold time.
Various application performance monitoring tools have been strategically
deployed at various points in the project architecture. The Usage Analyzer tool
creates usage reports by application/page by geography, and concurrency reports
for accurate performance modeling. The Performance Indicator measures and
categorizes application's performance (categorizing them into safe, warning and
threat zones) quantitatively using performance risk indicator (PRI) model.
Challenges faced
With the solution notifying both Web and database related performance
issues, there was resistance from stakeholders in accepting application
performance defects that were identified in production, and raising the same as
project defects in the development cycles. SAO practices and industry best
standards were followed for intergrating the ADDS engine with Enterprise Project
Management System. The PRI shows the degree of performance risk present in an
application. This is a new approach consisting of integrating individual
performance measures of the pages, database objects in a way that computes
overall risk of an application. With each source of performance information
being voluminous (approximately 35GB), the testing methods adopted to verify
and validate the results of the solution were challenging once the processing
was done. Cross- verifications were done manually as well as by pushing the
data to local databases and thereby constructing SQL queries that erify and
validate the results of the processed data.
Ramesh G, Head-Technology
Please tell us the business need that acted as the What has been the overall impact of this project on |
How the organization benefits
Pro-active Performance Risk Analysis and Remediation Governance Model has
been successfully implemented and adopted in the digital business engine of
Infosys. All Web applications are governed by this framework. It analyzes the
performance of 150+ web applications, 20 IIS Web servers, 4 Weblogic servers and
8 database servers which contain 15000+ Asp & ASPX pages, 3000+ Java pages and
19000+ database objects. A great way of measuring the efficacy of this project
is by analyzing the percentage of users for an application at any given point in
time.
Typically, the variation in this percentage should not be too high. Here, it
has been reduced to a variation of just 1% from 10-35% earlier. And this while
96-97% of users are accessing them concurrently.