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Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo

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Did you all get a chance to read that? As a public company we need to have Vista is the only solution built from the ground up on true enterprise

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our disclosure statement before all presentations. If you have any questions

on what it means please speak with our General Counsel.

Vista is the only solution built from the ground up on true enterprise

technology --- allowing you to ensure that you continue to provide your

faculty and students an outstanding experience

We definitely encourage you to send us emails about this topic and the

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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.

The relationship between Blackboard and Quest has blossomed over the

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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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Our primary goal is to get customers to implement end-to-end monitoring solutions. Too many customers have little to no production worthy monitoring

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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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Source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3232/2613972183_18b549ab81_m.jpg

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Source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3396/3507282396_3756634f01_m.jpg

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Source: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1330/3174009125_ec49351a6d_m.jpg

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psilver/412264230/

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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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QSC Foglight 5.16 Demo Script

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QSC Foglight 5.16 Demo Script

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QSC Foglight EUDB Demo Script

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Easily configured Virtual Machine by cloning VMs using XenCenter

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Toad is our primary database access tool. While we use SQLPlus for many

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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.

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