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//HERMES SoftLab/
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The ultimate goals of any CRM implementation are to improve sales and marketing efforts, and to provide superior customer service. To reach these goals and to maximize the benefits of investing in CRM, all business and IT stakeholders have to be actively involved. Concerns about poor system performance and failed user actions result in easy-to-use excuses for rejecting expensive Siebel implementations - which can ultimately lead to a complete ‘failure to achieve’ the business objectives that lead to the initial deployment of CRM.
MONITOR, MEASURE & MANAGE ORACLE SIEBEL CRM
Realize the full value and potential of Oracle Siebel CRM with Siebel Management Pack
WHITE PAPER Siebel Management Pack / April 2009
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1. Executive Summary
Business-critical CRM applications, such as Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM), automate complex business processes where high levels of application availability and performance are crucial. These applications support daily operations, drive revenue generation and empower new business initiatives. Comprehensive management and monitoring are critical to maintaining systems performance. The ongoing dependability and availability of the Siebel implementation will make or break the overall success of any Siebel environment. Those organizations that maintain a highly available and highly dependable Siebel system realize a marked competitive advantage which translates into improved bottom-line performance, reduced operating costs and superior customer satisfaction.
Why am I not able to connect to the Siebel application? Everything looks ok, but why didn’t I get an email notification from my Siebel application? Why is the application so slow today? These are just some of the questions the HERMES SoftLab Management Pack for Oracle’s Siebel CRM can help you answer today and eliminate tomorrow.
Siebel Management Pack is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, providing real end-to-end management and closing the gap between expectations and reality when it comes to your Siebel CRM environment.
This solution proactively monitors the health of the entire technology stack – from infrastructure and application servers to key Siebel components – delivering agreed service levels. It includes proactive, optimal detection and elimination of potential problems and bottlenecks, thus efficiently preventing system downtimes. With Siebel Management Pack, your investment in Siebel is protected, and your Siebel users’ experience is outstanding.
Top 6 reasons to use HERMES SoftLab Management Pack for Oracle’s Siebel CRM:
• Reduce the cost of management and total cost of ownership
• Show Siebel component health and impact on business services
• Maximize CRM user acceptance and ensure positive user experience
• Prevent system downtimes by identifying trends and reacting before they become faults and affect business
• Correlate performance against thresholds and maintain your service level agreements
• Provide a holistic, end-to-end view of your CRM environments
“Thanks to Siebel management solution by HERMES SoftLab, we were able to identify our performance issues and react. We can guarantee to our users a high availability of CRM applications.”
Karel Bourgois
Service Delivery Manager
British American Tobacco, France
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Contents
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
1. Executive Summary ..................................................................................... 2
2. About Siebel Management Pack ................................................................. 4
3. Features & Benefits ..................................................................................... 5
4. Siebel Management Pack in Real Life ......................................................... 7
5. The Bottom Line .......................................................................................... 9
WHITE PAPER Siebel Management Pack / April 2009
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2. About Siebel Management Pack
Siebel Management Pack is an effective solution that helps protect and leverage Siebel investment. Siebel Management Pack provides an efficient and productive link between applications that run on a server and other server components. Siebel Management Pack seamlessly integrates Oracle Siebel CRM and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. It allows you to perform proactive monitoring, rapid problem solving, and business oriented service management of your systems. Additionally, Siebel Management Pack is flexible, easy to use, and requires minimum end-user configuration. While you concentrate on your customers and business, Siebel Management Pack focuses on the health and performance of your Siebel applications.
With Siebel Management Pack, you can automate monitoring of your environment, define application management monitors & rules, which enable automated corrective actions, identify root cause for multiple failures, even if they are seemingly non-related. Siebel Management Pack empowers you to proactively manage your environment – it helps you identify and resolve bottlenecks, detect potential problems long before they reach your customers, and predict future performance constraints.
Figure 1:
Siebel Management Pack high-level architecture
WHITE PAPER Siebel Management Pack / April 2009
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3. Features & Benefits
KEY FEATURES
//DISCOVERY/
• Siebel Management Pack discovers Oracle Siebel CRM application topology by combining different Siebel object types and their dependencies
• As a result, it graphically displays the business impact of Siebel lower-level components, their failures, or performance degradations
//HEALTH & STATE MONITORING/
• Monitors the Siebel Application Servers, Gateway Server, Database Server availability, Siebel Web server Extension and the Siebel File System, including different High Availability configurations
• Monitors customer-created integration solutions, which use the Siebel Business Application Integration (eAI) open toolkit
• Monitors the health of Siebel components that run on Siebel Servers including monitoring the status, tasks and performance of Siebel Object Managers, i.e. Synchronization Manager, Assignment Manager, Workflow Manager, Replication Manager, and other
• From the System Center Operations Manager console, operators can perform starts and stops on Siebel CRM services and issue native commands to specific Siebel applications
• Tracks Siebel Remote user activities, including synchronization status and remote user database backlogs
• Notifies operator when errors occur within any level in the Siebel environment
• Simplified ability to monitor Siebel log files including detailed Siebel Server task log file information associated with a specific event
• Analyzes Siebel component crashes; which user is responsible for the crash and what the user performed before the crash
//PERFORMANCE VIEWS/
• Siebel processes, with memory consumption, and CPU utilization
• Siebel Server & Siebel Component statistics and state values
• Siebel Server, Database, and Component availability and status
• Siebel Filesystem and directory sizes
• Remote user synchronization history and status
//SARM ANALYZER/
Provides diagnostic tasks that help administrators correlate Oracle Siebel CRM Applications end-user performance and availability problems to root causes within the Siebel
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infrastructure. These tasks help pinpoint problematic areas in Siebel user transactions that consume excess time, CPU, or memory.
KEY BENEFITS
• Maximize CRM user acceptance by providing a positive end-user experience
• Monitor the response time of Siebel components to ensure that the entire technology stack is healthy
• Leverage your investment in enterprise systems management, ITIL, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
• Identify and react to Siebel sub-tasks that are not performing as expected and correlate that performance against thresholds and service-level agreements
• Root cause analysis, leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to look across the technology stack to pinpoint problems
• Graphically display performance data to identify ‘non-typical’ situations and to proactively identify future performance trends
• Lights out management via configurable monitors and rules that automatically implement corrective actions and/or notify IT and Siebel professionals when a problem occurs
• Best practice knowledge base that directs less experienced users to potential remedies before escalating to Siebel experts
• SARM diagnostic tasks pinpoint performance and availability issues; the data is available for proactive trend analysis, helping anticipate and prevent degradations
SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
For a list of supported platforms and software versions, refer to the Supported Platforms document on the product web page: http://www.hermes-softlab.com/products/mp/siebel_MP.html.
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4. Siebel Management Pack in Real Life
PRACTICAL EXAMPLES
Organizations are increasingly more dependent on computer systems and ultimately the services those systems provide. Successful organizations recognize the importance of providing complete and reliable services to their customers. System failures or errors, as common as they may seem, can severely disrupt business processes, and often result in data loss and other serious problems which can ultimately impact business productivity and profitability. Siebel Management Pack is designed to keep your systems and processes up and running, discover critical issues in your Siebel environment, smooth operations, on occasion prevent a disaster, or at least mitigate the consequences through quicker fault identification and problem resolution.
Out of Order
A leading US ISP experienced a memory leak on their gateway server, which quickly consumed all available memory. Another company had a policy to keep all log files set with the full logging option. This resulted in a fast data growth rate and disk clean-up had to be performed on a regular basis to prevent massive data buildups which could ultimately consume all available disk space. Both cases eventually led to a system crash. IT administrators first had to restart the systems and hunt for the root cause, running full system diagnostics. The systems were unavailable for several hours… impacting business productivity and profitability.
//How Siebel Management Pack can help/ Siebel Management Pack provides availability management and advanced monitoring capabilities to proactively identify problems in the Siebel environment. For example, a key process may have stopped prematurely, a disk may be approaching capacity, or a log file is too large. Siebel Management Pack alerts operators to such conditions and the following additional assistance can be provided:
• Instructions for a corrective action that should be taken
• A pre-defined action that the administrator can initiate
• An automatic diagnostics & recovery action, such as restarting processes, or sending an email message to the user if a critical condition occurs
Gone with the Wind
A large corporation experienced an email problem and several branch sales offices did not receive updated pricelists. Email pricelist distribution was an automated, “out-of-sight”,
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action and thus no errors were produced. It turned out that the email connection component had failed.
//How Siebel Management Pack can help/
Siebel Management Pack automatically performs discovery of your Siebel environment from a technical point-of-view. The Siebel Application Topology diagram view displays a detailed analysis of the impact of changes in health state of different Siebel infrastructure objects. Thus, you are immediately aware of the business impact of lower level component failures or of performance degradations. The Siebel Application Topology diagram view also allows you to quickly find the root cause of a service failure by using point and click navigation on faulty components for further diagnosis and problem resolution.
Figure 2 shows the Siebel application topology and the critical path of the issue where you can see all parts of Siebel which are impacted.
Rabbits or Snails
Several companies have expressed concern about the limited number of tasks Siebel allows to be executed in parallel per component. Once the maximum is reached, all new requests are queued, reducing system responsiveness.
//How Siebel Management Pack can help/ Performance management with Siebel Management Pack is implemented by tracking slowdowns or bottlenecks that may disrupt end-user productivity within your Siebel environment. Siebel Management Pack in combination with other management packs - like Windows Server MP - alerts Siebel administrators to critical conditions. Siebel Management Pack performance views also provide a complementary and consolidated view of Siebel performance information - like the number of Siebel tasks running and a summary of overall system resource characteristics.
Figure 2:
Siebel application topology
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5. The Bottom Line
By understanding which components comprise a service and the performance characteristics that are associated with those components, IT professionals can review and manage system problems before any service levels deteriorate to the point where business decisions are affected. Consequently, it is important to work with software that both acknowledges service management concepts and works within those service management guidelines to measure, report, and track events in order to monitor and correct potential problem areas. Siebel Management Pack seamlessly integrates into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager installations, extending the functionality to include monitoring, measuring, and managing Oracle Siebel CRM environments. Siebel Management Pack is a system management solution. It provides pro-active monitoring capabilities within the framework of service management, and allows IT staff to detect end-to-end customer issues while drilling-down to the elements that may be the cause of problems. Siebel Management Pack advances the reliability and manageability of customer relationship management (CRM) processes, providing optimal detection and resolving of potential problems and bottlenecks, thus efficiently preventing system downtimes. By doing this, Siebel Management Pack allows end users to become aware of problems long before they occur, and long before they affect any important business issues.
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NOTICES The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. HERMES SOFTLAB D.D. PROVIDES THIS MATERIAL "AS IS" AND MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. HERMES SOFTLAB D.D. SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ERRORS CONTAINED HEREIN OR FOR INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES IN CONNECTION WITH THE FURNISHING, PERFORMANCE OR USE OF THIS MATERIAL WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, OR OTHER LEGAL THEORY. TRADEMARKS This document contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. All rights are reserved. No part of this document may be photocopied, reproduced or translated to another language without the prior written consent of HERMES SoftLab d.d. Microsoft®, Windows®, Windows® 2000, Windows Server™ 2003, and Windows NT® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Oracle® and Siebel™ are a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All other product names are the property of their respective trademark or service mark holders and are hereby acknowledged.
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//ABOUT HERMES SOFTLAB MANAGEMENT PRODUCTS/ HERMES SoftLab is the recognized leader in enterprise application and infrastructure management for heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments. Our management product line delivers strong, immediate value for customers and includes best-in-class solutions for management of Oracle Siebel CRM/BI, EMC Documentum, Citrix Xen, and Microsoft Terminal Server.
//ABOUT HERMES SOFTLAB/ HERMES SoftLab, a member of ComTrade Group, is an international provider of software engineering services and IT solutions serving storage and gaming industries, telecommunication service providers, financial institutions and the public sector. The company was established in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1990 and has grown into an internationally recognized center of technology with its headquarters in Slovenia, and offices across Europe and the USA.
//ABOUT COMTRADE GROUP/ ComTrade Group is the parent company of the HERMES SoftLab. Recognized as a leader in information and communication technologies in Southeastern Europe, the ComTrade Group has over 15 years experience within the region. The company is present in 14 countries spread over 2 continents with over 1600 employees and is able to offer a range of IT solutions, R&D services, production and distribution of ComTrade Computers and other ICT and electronic equipment.