The situation

The IT department of a mortgage bank (an SMT customer through 12 years) asked SMT Data’s consultants if they could explain the changes, which had occurred in one of their business applications a few months earlier.

The application’s CPU usage had increased and the response times had become more erratic, though there had been no changes to the application during the period and the workload (business activity) had only increased slightly.

The response

Using some of the features from the customer’s IT Business Intelligence solution, SMT Data came up with the answer right away.

About a year before the problems started there had been an application change, which doubled the (then) small application’s CPU consumption. SMT Data’s consultants even pointed out the exact Monday where this had taken effect.

The reason

The change went unnoticed back then since the application’s CPU consumption was insignificant at the time, but also because the additional resource usage originated from only a very few (very heavy) transactions.

As it turned out, the later increase in business activity involved exactly these heavy transactions, thereby causing the application’s increased CPU consumption and erratic response times.

And so . . .

In at least one bank all application responsible managers are now using SMT Data's ITBI tools to reveal similar situations as they occur (as part of their personal success criteria).