The document discusses Blackboard's relationship with Quest and how they have worked together over 3+ years. It provides details on benchmarking and monitoring tools used by Blackboard like Quest Foglight and Toad to test performance and uncover issues. The focus is on getting customers to implement comprehensive monitoring solutions to help manage systems and trends. Specific tools and demos of Quest Foglight are also referenced.

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2. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo
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3. Did you all get a chance to read that? As a public company we need to have
our disclosure statement before allfrom the ground youon true enterprise
Vista is the only solution built presentations. If up have any questions
ontechnology --- please speak with our Generalyou continue to provide your
what it means allowing you to ensure that Counsel.
faculty and students an outstanding experience
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4. We definitely encourage you to send us emails about this topic and the
Reference Architecture in general. Our goal is to promote the Reference
Architecture so that all deployments of Blackboard meet the strategic and
operational needs of our customers.
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5. The relationship between Blackboard and Quest has blossomed over the
years. In its nature, it has always been a grass roots effort by Quest Public
Sector group and the Blackboard Performance Engineering team. Both
groups have worked together in what I would call a no strings attached
relationship. We simply want to work together for the betterment of our joint
install-base. Over the course of the 3+ years we have worked together, we
have written papers just about Bb and Quest, as well as partnered with Sun
Microsystems and Dell. Below are the papers we have written to date. A new
paper will be coming out this fall about our most recent benchmark at the
Dell performance laboratory.
http://www.quest.com/public-sector/docs/bb-performance-engineering-
toad.pdf
http://www.quest.com/public-sector/docs/bb-performance-engineering-
spotlight.pdf
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/public/White_Papers/hied_bl
ackboard_whitepaper.pdf
http://www.sun.com/third-
party/global/blackboard/collateral/SunBlackboardWP10_1_07.pdf
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/public/Brochures/Dell_Bb_Q
uest_wp_Jan6.pdf
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9. Our primary goal is to get customers to implement end-to-end monitoring
solutions. Too many customers have little to no production worthy monitoring
that helps them isolate problems, manage performance and trend capacity.
The Quest Foglight tool(s) in particular are exceptional tools for robust end-
to-end monitoring and management. We use the tools in our labs, as well
during production runs of our benchmarks. These tools have been
instrumental in helping us uncover a number of potential performance and
scalability challenges during testing phases prior to release of the
Blackboard product.
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13. Source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3232/2613972183_18b549ab81_m.jpg
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16. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psilver/412264230/
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18. The focus of this slide deals with the User Experience, Application Layer,
Database layer and Enterprise Storage. SNMP can also apply to Quest’s
Foglight as both SNMP and CIM are supported. A lot of IT shops make use
of Open Source SNMP platforms, as well as commercialized platforms
provided by the hardware vendors themselves making the Quest Foglight
component more complementary in the space.
We will be talking about Quest’s End-User Management component to the
Foglight suite. This is the only component in the suite that the Blackboard
Performance Engineering team has not fully tested. One tool that we have
presented in the past and recommended to customers before is Coradiant
TrueSight. We continue to use this product in our managed hosting division,
as well as many customers have purchased this product. We will continue to
advocate for this product, but will also encourage customers to demo
Quest’s product, as well as Citrix EdgeSight.
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24. QSC Foglight 5.16 Demo Script
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25. QSC Foglight 5.16 Demo Script
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26. QSC Foglight EUDB Demo Script
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50. Easily configured Virtual Machine by cloning VMs using XenCenter
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52. Toad is our primary database access tool. While we use SQLPlus for many
operations, Toad provides a robust, easy to use visual interface that we use
for script execution and basic DBA tasks. Many of the basic views that come
with Toad are helpful in quickly spotting issues such as misplaced indexes in
the wrong tablespaces, as well as viewing the size of tablespaces and data
files. We also use it for script execution of routine database maintenance
functions.
PAO (Performance Analysis for Oracle) is our primary monitoring and
instrumentation tool we use in Blackboard performance engineering. There
are many reasons for using the tool set, but our primary reason is the
warehousing capabilities. Our secondary reason for using the tool is the
ability to compare timelines. We can take a baseline of activity, make a
change to our configuration and perform a simple comparison of the
workloads.
Foglight is by far my absolute favorite performance instrumentation tool. We
use the Tomcat cartridge for Foglight primary as it’s a lightweight
instrumentation framework and imposes minimal overhead. I like a number
of aspects, but my favorite three are the following:
1. I love that I can define a simple rule engine to perform a trace of the
application code, including collecting SQL literals. Better yet, I can step into
the trace and do a fast find by exclusive time to see what method call or SQL
statement was responsible for consuming the most time. 52

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