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1 Operational Excellence2 Understanding the platform3 Creating baselines4 Measuring change5 Quick win tips

Welcome.Microsoft Services helps businesses around the world maximize their investment in Microsoft products and technologies.

Today’s Agenda

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Operational Excellence

Become pro-active• Review the status of monitoring and

maintenance jobs• Identify performance trends during the

application lifecycle• Increasing a teams’ skill level translates in

a higher service level

Tip!Microsoft Premier Services offers various workshops to help increase the knowledge of your operational team.

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Understanding the platform

• Validates all business logic configured in the system

• Manages all metadata• Manages data storage (CRUD)• It is the only supported write access into the

CRM databases

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Understanding the platform

Dynamics CRM ensures scale out support by firstly dividing functionality up into different server roles, secondly by allowing multiple instance of a server role to be part of the architecture.

SQL Server

CRM Front End

Server

CRM Front End

Server

NLBCRM

Back End Server

CPU &MemoryCPU, Memory & IO

CustomApps

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Understanding the platform

Sizing mattersUsing the highly scalable Dynamics CRM server role architecture and the plethora of scalability options available in SQL Server, you have many options to scale your infrastructure to meet demand.

To size a deployment for Microsoft CRM, there are some rules of thumb but the most effective way to determine the resources needed to handle the projected workload is to setup load testing. Added benefit of load and stress testing is the identification of performance bottlenecks prior to deployment.

Dedication of resourcesImproving efficiency using virtualization and consolidation techniques is great, but you will need to monitor how resources are shared.

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Creating baselines

Finding bottlenecksBefore optimizing performance, we need to know what bottlenecks exist in the CRM deployment.

Performance MonitorThe performance monitor (perfmon.exe) is an excellent tool to start with. It allows for monitoring performance counters on a Microsoft Windows machine.

SQL TracingWith SQL Server as the heart of the Dynamics CRM architecture, performance here is key. SQL Server allows for the creation of traces that will trace information about long running queries and blocking issues.

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Creating baselines

Vital Signs• CPU (utilization average < 70%)• Disk (latency per read < 12 ms)• Network (utilization average < 70%)• Memory (fit for purpose)

SQL Tracing• Long Running Queries (Duration > 250ms)• Blocking (Blocking requests per hour)• Buffer Manager• Sort Warnings

Tip!The CRM Performance Review delivered by Microsoft Premier Services can help you baseline your environment.

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Measuring Change

Over time, factors impacting performance might change.Throughout the lifecycle of a Dynamics CRM solution, different factors will play their part in the impact they have on performance.

1. During development2. After releasing changes3. After changes to the infrastructure4. When integrated systems change their workload to CRM5. During production

Tip!The CRM Performance Toolkit is free to download.

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Quick win tips

• Follow CRM customization best practices (Published on MSDN)• Review the Microsoft Dynamics CRM whitepapers for tips and

tricks (Optimizing and Maintaining Microsoft Dynamics CRM)• Limit the amount of data returned in code (don’t return all

columns and/or all rows if you only need a subset)• Try to avoid expensive synchronous calls, develop them as a-

synchronous where possible• Use NoLock hints in SQL based reports• Review your SQL Server maintenance, consider automation

using jobs

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Thank You!Stick Around for Q&A