Performance issues and performance monitoring - what to do when CRM is slow

David Wanless

Our system is hosted by Blackbaud. We are on CRM 4.0 SP29, and will be upgrading to SP33 or similar in the next few months. We migrated to Azure about a year ago. We have had long-standing but highly variable performance problems, with periods (from minutes to days) of very slow page opening, Data Lists timing out, Ad-hoc Queries being slow etc. They got worse after we moved to Azure. We've had great difficulty getting any meaningful help from Blackbaud, but have recently finally managed to get a support person to look through the SQL logs and give us detailed advice about processes involved in record locking, which has been very useful in identifying some processes which we were able to reschedule, retire or modify to reduce impact.

Unfortunately, we had a day last week when we had terrible performance again and Blackbaud's initial investigations didn't show any significant record locking. They also didn't see any resource constraints of concern on the server. They will investigate further.

We have been asking for some time, for some tool to use so that we can investigate in real time, the performance, including record locking, of our server. Apparently Blackbaud used to provide such, but withdrew it because of security concerns. We would really like to see a tool of some sort reinstated, so that when our users experience poor performance we can quickly investigate, rather than logging a case with Blackbaud and taking hours to weeks to get an investigation.

Please vote for our idea:

https://bbcrm.ideas.aha.io/ideas/CRM-I-3286

We'd also be interested to hear of any other ways you've improved system performance on Blackbaud hosted environments.

Chris Whisenhunt

@David Wanless I hear about this sort of issue often. We've successfully helped organizations with these sort of problems before and even provide a free database analysis. Reach out to get that scheduled.

David Wanless

@Chris Whisenhunt, many thanks for the offer. In the intervening time, we've done a lot of work with Blackbaud digging through SQL Snaps (which they've provided) and investigating various processes, and have made many improvements. Blackbaud are continuing to investigate a couple of things and are planning to roll out access to some monitoring tools in their new BBCRM Cloud Portal, although no timeline has been set for that. We've learned a lot and the situation is much better. If we need help in future we'll certainly ask. Thanks again, David.