Foglight shows Eveready the way

Eveready Industries deployed Quest Foglight Performance Analysis for faster resolution of problems with database and application processes. By Heena Jhingan

Eveready Industries is a household name in the dry cell batteries and torches space in the country, and recently it entered the mosquito repellent industry. To manage this kind of growth, the company needed a robust ERP system and application tools. However, it was becoming difficult for the company to keep pace with its growing business as the processes were taking longer time and deteriorating the database analysis performance.

With an end-to-end ERP solution in place, everything was going fine with the IT set up at Eveready Industries till a couple of years back when it realized that certain database processes had slowed down, even though the company had been upgrading the ERP system from time to time.

For almost seven years, Eveready had been using Oracle E-Business Suite for various processes across departments, including HR and manufacturing. Initially, Eveready had deployed the Oracle 11i suite, which was later upgraded to the 10g database. “Once we conducted the upgrade, we realized there was a need to fine tune database parameters in relation to the application. We were doing this by using the DBA support by running certain queries, as a traditional practice, along with constant monitoring of the database. Subsequently, we upgraded the database platform from 10g to the next level and, once again, these tuning aspects came into the picture in terms of partitioning and monitoring that had to be done. We noticed that it was taking too long to do these kind of activities,” explained Arup Choudhury, Senior GM – IT, Eveready Industries Limited.

This led to newer issues that started to dog the IT department. The load on the database began building up. They were faced with poor application performance, which directly had an adverse effect on the application uptime. He said, “We were using an upgraded version of the database solution and application, but we were finding it difficult to track the the problem areas and the DBAs were finding it difficult to identify and resolve those issues.”

“We were on a look out for a tool that would help us track both database and the applications and proactively lead the DBAs to the cause of concern. To begin with, we were trying to check the availability of an Oracle tool that could have been integrated to the existing system to solve the problem,” he recalled.

Technology vs. Cost

Although he was aware that HP and IBM offered solutions quite similar to what he was looking for, he shortlisted Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) that came with the 10g database and the Foglight Performance Analysis tool from Quest. Having seen the demo of the solutions, he observed that as technology solutions both were similar but there were certain things that made Foglight a more attractive deal.

“The OEM needed a separate license, besides, the cost of OEM was coming out to be nearly three times more than what we paid for Foglight. This was a critical factor for us. Such solutions play a vital role for organizations like ours that need such analysis on day-to-day basis,” Choudhury reasoned.

Also, there was a comfort level with Quest that pushed the case for its solution. “We have been using Toad and Spotlight solutions from Quest. Quest has substantial knowledge about Oracle database as such. I could not say the same for the other solutions, but I was confident that the Quest solution would be able to do value addition on Oracle databases,” he said, adding that they did not face major challenges during the implementation.

The DBA team at Eveready had its own traditional way of writing queries. Users are now more relaxed though the first month after the implementation was tough for them.

He said, “For them it was a change as they were now on an interface where they did not need to write queries. Rather, they needed to change their mind set.”

The solution offers built-in workflows, automated advice and precompiled action plans that guide the DBAs through response-time and wait-event evaluation, saving time spent on formulating queries each time. Choudhury is satisfied by the results after having used the solution for over an year now. He said that the IT team had observed almost a 30% increase in DBA productivity.

“We do not have unplanned downtime and issue resolution in terms of application performance has reduced, I will not be able to put a number to that, but the number of incidents of issues have reduced significantly. In case of ERP, there are some batch processes that run and each batch process has some activities like insertion of records, etc. There we find that DBAs have been proactive in tuning these queries in the batch process and this has cut down the time needed by the batch process,” he added.

Choudhury said that they had been using the solution for an year now, the important thing is that there is a huge repository of historical data, which they needed to use for forward forecasting. “This again is a part of the Foglight tool but is a separate module, which we have not yet deployed. Now that the deployment is almost an year old now, maybe by this year end or the next year we will go for it,” he concluded.

heena.jhingan@expressindia.com