The world is changing. You should keep up.

Do you sometimes have 'sudden' or 'spontaneous' changes? An application that's suddenly very slow, without any reasonable explanation? Resulting in overtime, stress and sleepless nights?

Modern applications are built using more than just the application itself. They depend on hardware, software, network and storage infrastructure. The landscape they run in is constantly changing. And every landscape change changes the applications that depend on it. Often the change is small, but sometimes the change is unexpectedly and dramatically big and makes the application your responsible for grind to a halt. Leaving you up the creek without a paddle.

Because your IT landscape is constantly changing, application maintenance is a continuous process. You need to include performance maintenance if you don't want to be surprised.

A good example is the migration to SQL Server 2016. After the upgrade to SQL Server 2016 several of my customers noticed that applications became very slow for several minutes at unpredictable moments.This was caused by statistics updates that happen more often in SQL Server 2016 than in earlier versions. But not so often that you'll notice during testing. Leaving the big surprise for when you're already in production.

Somewhere in the extensive release notes it says that there's a change in the moment when statistics get updated. Statistics are used to make your database faster. Updating statistics causes a very heavy load on the database server if it contains a large volume of data. You don't want that to happen when you need the database for your application.

For customers where we perform continuous performance management, including their acceptance environment, we were able to prevent slowdowns in production. For customers where we only measure production we provided a fast fix for the problem.

Don't get surprised by changes in your IT landscape that hit your applications. Contact us today.