Workshop: Application Performance Tuning Advisor

Another one of the services we offer at the ADC team.

For existing customers, if you would like take advantage of this service within your organisation, please contact your ADC. If you are not currently engaged with Application Development Consulting and are interested in this service, please contact ADCinfo@microsoft.com. Customers often have a deployed application that is experiencing or is likely to experience performance or scalability difficulties over time. The Application is based on multiple Microsoft and Partner products and typically spans multiple tiers and disciplines ranging from the desktop, browser or mobile device to various application servers and database technologies. The nature of the application means that building and executing a strategy to tackle the issues is beyond the scope of a single Premier Support case. Due to complexity or dependencies on other systems and databases, the application cannot easily be brought into the Microsoft scalability labs, or does not have the facilities in-house to support a short term Microsoft Consulting engagement.The Application Performance Tuning Advisor offering focuses on the Architecture, Design, and custom code that can be delivered outside of a single contiguous week, on a customer’s own equipment and site. An Application Development Consultant (ADC) acts as the Application Performance Tuning Advisor working with key sponsors within the customer to deliver both technical and performance testing process expertise, recommending improvements within the context of restrictions agreed with the business.The delivery follows a simple, flexible, model;     •  1 hour scoping call to determine technology and back story.     •  1 day on site to assess the system, recommend monitoring techniques and tooling, and to estimate the number of remaining iterations.     •  2 day iterations of results analysis, recommendations, measuring improvement, and agreeing next steps.     •  The Customer may agree a fix is not possible or cost effective and disengage without further iterationsThe Tuning Advisor offering is specifically targeted at in-house applications that involve multiple products rather than the configuration of a single Microsoft platform. For example, an application that exposes several web services, has a Sql database, and some proprietary or legacy client code, that is failing to meet performance targets, suffering intermittent failure or an undiagnosed delay, is a suitable fit.

A customer that has a custom-developed application that won’t perform or scale to meet current or expected future requirements and who want to implement pragmatic recommendations to validate and achieve those goals. The application has been developed in-house and the customer has full source code access. The application involves multiple products of which some may contain legacy or components that cannot be changed.

A customer is seeking to assess and implement cost effective changes that are possible, within the context of the application or other business restrictions.

• Scoped engagement delivered in iterations, each with measureable and agreed goals.
• Engagement is delivered in consumed ADC hours – not contiguous days (except the initial on site)
• As many iterations can be planned in as necessary
• Resourced from a pool of existing skills in the ADC team