Efficient Support SystemBeth McLamb

Anurag Saini

MavenWire

This session will provide guidelines to

increase the efficiency of an OTM support

organization.

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Having the ability to meet, or

exceed, agreed upon Service

Level Agreements between

system administrators and

customers, while providing

ongoing value to the

organization.

What is an

efficient

support

system?

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Where do we start?

• Define which components of OTM are supported and release levels (OTM, GTM, FTI)

• Identify external systems implemented (pcmiler, milemaker, rateware, etc.)

• Document integration points and responsible groups for each

• Gather environment documentation – server details, operating system information, patches

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Define Components Required

Infrastructure

Support

OTM Technical Support

OTM Application

Support

OTM Application

Enhancements

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Infrastructure Support

Infrastructure

Support

OTM Technical Support

OTM Application

Support

OTM Application

Enhancements

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• Hardware

• Network

• Storage

• Operating System

OTM Technical Support

Infrastructure

Support

OTM Technical Support

OTM Application

Support

OTM Application

Enhancements

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• OTM Patches/Upgrades

• Property settings

• Database

OTM Application Support

Infrastructure

Support

OTM Technical Support

OTM Application

Support

OTM Application

Enhancements

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• Software issues

• Software performance

OTM Application Enhancements

Infrastructure

Support

OTM Technical Support

OTM Application

Support

OTM Application

Enhancements

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• Software

improvements

There must be harmony

Customer Expectations

Operating Level

Agreement (OLA)

Service Level

Agreement (SLA)

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• Internal

agreement

between OTM

Support Groups

• Agreement

between OTM

Support Groups

and OTM End

User / Customer

Example – environment refresh

Lead time for request

Time required to

execute request

Commitment to fulfill request

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Components of an SLA/OLA

• Quantitative performance standards

• Agreed upon severity levels and

turnaround

• Continuous review

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Establish responsibilities

• Create a RACI Matrix to identify roles and assignment of

cross-functional responsibilities

– RACI represents:

• R – Responsible – who is assigned to do the work

• A – Accountable – who owns the success of the work

• C – Consulted – who can give valuable input

• I – Informed – who has to be aware of the work

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Sample RACI

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Support Structure• Each organization is different and responsibilities may be

assigned differently between groups.

• Some tasks may be managed by external groups or

everything may be internal.

• End users should have a single point of contact and the

assignment of tasks should be decided by the support

organization.

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Engaging Support – single point of contact

Issue or Work Request

Screen Enhancement

Missing Transaction

Environment Refresh

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Defining issues

• Implement a solid issue reporting/tracking tool

• Educate those entering the issue to supply adequate

detail

• Identify request type – incident, work, enhancement

• Determine severity and response time

• Define hours of support and shift handover

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Sample incident response matrixPriority Business

Impact

Description Response

Time

Resolution

Time

Severity 1 System

Down

System is inaccessible. 30 minutes 4 hours

Severity 2 High Impact A condition or issue that has an

adverse impact on operations until

unresolved.

1 Hour 8 hours

Severity 3 Degraded

Operation

Question concerning product

performance, or an intermittent low

impact issue.

2 Hours 24 hours

Severity 4 Minimal

Impact

A question concerning general

utilization/implementation

24 Hours As agreed

upon

People – your most valuable

resource!What makes up a

Support

Organization?

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Identify the skillset

• Based on your support definition – gather the right

people

• Bring support team in early during your implementation

to allow for overlap and knowledge transfer

• Invest in high quality training

• Don’t allow application support and enhancement teams

to work in silos

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Crossover between support and

enhancement groups

OTM Support OTM Enhancements

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Build your toolset

• Create meaningful documentation with detailed issue

resolution

• Follow a well documented migration strategy to keep

environments in sync

• Automate mundane tasks to keep the team challenged

• Reward your team for innovative ideas and adding value

to the organization

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OTM is

powerful –

avoid common

mistakes

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Whether a new implementation

or one that has been live for

years, don’t allow these to rob

precious time from your support

team

Agents – power with caution• Recommendation: One Event One Agent. Many agents

can be triggered by a single lifetime event. These agents work in parallel.

• Badly configured agents can be a performance hit in the long run. Review frequently as volumes environment changes.

• Agents run as serial workflow on the application server. One action does not start executing until its predecessor has completed If an error occurs within an agent, database changes are NOT discarded.

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Recurrent deviations

• Create a process to handle “recurrent deviations”. Don’t

continue to fix the problem. Find a proper way of

reporting “recurrent issues” and fix the root cause

• Implement a short term solution to keep the business

running, but a also have a defined RCA process and

plan to resolve the issue permanently

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Modifying public data

• Do not modify public / default data or objects as they

could get overwritten with a patch or upgrade

• Place objects in a custom folder to remove the

dependency on upgrades

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Purging

• Insufficient (or non-existent) purging of transmissions

• Insufficient (or non-existent) shipments/orders/invoices

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OTM Logging

• Unnecessary logging impacts performance perspective

and may hinder analysis of the logs when issues do

arise

• Adhoc logs enabled could cause perf issues as all of the

logging enabled is logging for the entire domain and not

just that user. Change these to user logs.

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Inactivate Rates, users

• Inactivating expired rate records

• Expire user accounts that are no longer active

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Modifications to DB Schema• The OTM DB Schema is complicated and consists of over 1600 tables. This requires an

experienced skillset to manage.

• Many OTM customers end up adding or deleting indexes to optimize performance.

Remember to document them, as they may get re-created when OTM patches are applied.

( Refer to Doc ID 762939.1)

– "It should be noted that these indexes have to be maintained going forward or a

request can be submitted to have the indexes added in the OTM Core product in a

future release. Indexes will be added only if it is beneficial for the application

performance as a whole and not for a specific implementation“

• Never allow modifications of packages or custom packages to go into GLOGOWNER,

REPORTOWNER, or any other OTM built-in schemas, create a custom schema for this

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Working with Oracle Support• Gather all details for the issue in simple language

• Gather steps to recreate the issue and what was

happening when it occurred

• Run qdlogs script and attach output to the ticket

• Run the OTM analyzer script – My Oracle Support note

1579683.1

• For performance issues check My Oracle Support note

887885.1

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Thank You -MavenWire