We all know Maximo is a complex product. It has plenty of features and is very flexible but sometimes complex to manage especially when system performances are poor.
A lot of things may affect the perceived performances of Maximo and it may be hard to have an overview of the entire system configuration.
What are the largest tables in the database that may need archiving?
Are database statistics updated to optimize database queries?
How much data is stored for each site?
Has the workload of system increased over the last years?
What are the most heavy reports users execute?
What are the most resources-consuming crontasks and escalations?
How is the reports/crontasks/escalations workload spread across the day?
These and many other questions have an answer in the Maximo Health Check report.
Maximo Health Check report is a utility for IBM Maximo and IBM Control Desk that can help identify and analyze issues, errors, or incorrect configurations that can lead to unsatisfying system performances.
Adding more JVMs to your application server cluster seldom solves Maximo performance issues. In our experience, the most effective performance improvement techniques are on the database side.
For large Maximo systems data archiving may be needed. This is because, after several years of usage, large volume of data accumulated into some tables slowing down database inserts and updates. Moving unnecessary data out of those tables can greatly improve overall system performances.
When specific application queries, reports or escalations have unsatisfying execution times database indexes optimization could be the answer. Adding the right indexes and removing the wrong ones is a complex activity that requires deep skills but can produce outstanding results in many cases.
Sometimes index optimization is not enough to fix a badly written SQL query. In this case SQL queries optimization is the right technique. SQL queries are everywhere in Maximo: start center portlets, application queries, escalations and reports. By simply refactoring those SQL statements I have obtained impressive results in many cases.
Database tuning is the last chance. Assuming IBM suggested settings have been applied, this is 'brute force' approach can bring some incremental improvement to overall performances.
Labels: advanced, best practice, crontask, database, performance, report, tuning
