Slow Performance in WebUI

[#1]

Summary

Slow performance in FNMS when loading a view and recommended Database Maintenance

Symptoms

Several views in FlexNet Manager Suite could have a decent amount of data and there are several factors that can cause decreased performance, for example in:

• All Discovered Devices
• All Inventory
• All Licenses
• All Applications
• Installed Applications
• All Purchases
• System Tasks

Cause

The vast majority of time it takes to load data in the WebUI is from SQL Server, so any performance issues or degraded health status of your Databases will have an immediate impact in the WebUI performance.

Most views do cache the data in FNMSSnapshot Database, so views running for the first time after any change of records could take longer than repeated views and after filters being applied.
Reconciles during business hours can also cause slightly slower performance, depending on your available SQL Server resources and the amount of data the Reconcile is processing.

Resolution

Things to consider to improve/maintain your SQL Server performance for any On Premise implementation (Flexera already maintains all this for Cloud Customers):

1. Review your SQL Server and Application Server's hardware requirements to match at a minimum with the Release Notes.
2. Ensure that you have enough disk space for the growth of your Database files and Transaction logs for all FNMS Databases and SQL Server's TempDB.
3. It is recommended to keep a high Autogrowth value "In Megabytes" (e.g "In Percent" value of 10% for a 300GB Database is a 30GB of growth all at once, which causes a high Disk I/O impact).
4. If you are using SQL Server 2014 or above, ensure that your Databases are using Compatibility Level for SQL Server 2012 (110).
5. Ensure that Auto Shrink is set to False as default on all FNMS and TempDB Databases, since there will be several temporary Tables created and dropped daily during the nightly reconcile that would have to regain the space.
6. Have your Database Administrators manage the maintenance on your SQL Server and Indexes on the Tables, and recommend that they do so outside of the nightly Reconcile job hours. This could cause a waste of resources as most DBAs generally assume that the system is not in use at night.
7. If you use a shared SQL Server environment, ensure that there is enough resources for FNMS during peak hours and slow performance times. Also make sure you have proper disk I/O performance.
8. Verify that the FNMS Maintenance tasks are scheduled in the Application Server's Task Scheduler (incl. "FlexNet inventory data maintenance" and "FlexNet Manager Suite database support task").

Workaround

In terms of usability, things to consider to reduce the necessary load on your Database Server are:

• Use the views that corresponds to the data that you need: for example, use Installed Applications view instead of All Applications, use Active Inventory instead of All Inventory...etc
• Load the amount of rows that you need: for example, keep the rows per page to 20 or 50 if you don't need to look at 1,000 rows at a time.
• Use filters as needed, and in FNMS 2016 and up you can click on Save view as to save a view with your preferred filters.