Imagine if the current pandemic crisis had hit us 20 years ago. Few people in 2000 had access to the kind of work from home policy we have now. The whole industry would have had to halt its operations.
These days we can take advantage of engineers working remotely and at the same time, organizations can make use of the powerful remote-access platforms available to them.
The increased requests for performance monitoring and tuning that we at Performetriks have received since the advent of the COVID virus is a clear indication that:
speed and reliability is a critical business factor
performance is a top priority
As a performance and security consulting service provider we love this development!
In this post, I’d like to share some insights on how the increase in people working from home impacts the performance of mission-critical business applications. Additionally, I’ll suggest some measures you can implement to prevent any negative impact on your operations.
Problem
The shift to staff working from home raises the pressure on the most critical elements of our communication chain. We can no longer talk to our teammates or customers in regular meetings. Email and video chat have replaced the usual personal interaction, and we’re also gaining proficiency with the standard workflow tools. These applications are not usually exposed to such spiky traffic because we rarely use them under our regular working conditions. We’ve all been pushed to the limits in recent days though and have neither the time nor patience for slow-loading services. It means that problem tickets pile up in our operational teams’ backlog and make their job even harder.
Analysis
When things go south you should never panic but investigate the root cause of any problematic service-reliability issues. I’m hoping that you use a modern monitoring stack such as Digital Experience and Full Stack monitoring solutions. If not, this is the time to migrate the monitoring of your mission-critical apps to a state-of-the-art monitoring solution.
Exchange is a mission-critical application for one of our customers here at Performetriks. Due to the restrictions of working from home, employees had utilized Outlook Web Access instead of the classic Outlook Client. As a result:
The number of OWA users doubled in the last 30 days
Response times were very slow:
The error rate on OWA shot up:
Solution
First of all, ensure that an AI-powered problem-analysis solution takes care of the monitoring of your most critical applications. By providing insights and solutions to problems, these full-stack solutions let your teams focus on optimization and innovation instead of digging through the layers of never-ending stacks.
Secondly, visualize four golden metrics for all your top applications on information radiators. Share these dashboards with the entire organization. Everybody needs to understand that reliability is a top business priority.
Thirdly, investigate the root cause of any slowdowns and implement remediation measures. A poor application performance could have a drastic effect on your organization’s productivity. Don’t ignore any increase in response times, either. Take immediate action and fix the root cause behind it.
I’d love to share stories about how performance engineering and monitoring improves the success of our clients. Also, if you’re dealing with slow-loading applications or would like to make performance part of your development process, please feel free to contact me at any time.
Keep doing the good work. Happy performance engineering!