We understand that the healthy performance of your SuccessFactors solutions is critical to your business success. A significant key to this is the ability to measure, monitor, and manage your environments as efficiently and effectively as possible.
To facilitate this, we are now providing you with two new industry-leading support tools in the Cloud Support Portal that will help you get the most of your cloud-based data center operations and applications. These tools, the Service Status Dashboard and Customer Performance Metrics Portal, go beyond what typical cloud vendors provide for metrics as they provide you with deeper, more specific insights for greater visibility and transparency. This data will help you manage your SuccessFactors cloud talent management products more efficiently and cost-effectively.
The Service Status Dashboard
The intuitive Service Status Dashboard gives you the power to monitor and manage your own operations in the SuccessFactors data center through real-time insights and regular updates into current and historical system usage data.
This is a helpful reference tool to use when troubleshooting performance issues. The dashboard identifies the level of service that is being delivered to you and if there is a service interruption or issue with performance or connectivity, as you can see in the screen shot here. You will have data at your fingertips on specific incidents and their impact, along with near real-time updates directly from the SuccessFactors Operations team concerning resolution times.
The dashboard provides you with status updates, such as:
- All services are available and operating normally.
- A service interruption was restored.
- Intermittent performance or connectivity issues with a product or process are occurring.
- There is a widespread performance or connectivity issue with a product or process.
- There are incidents that affect several customers.
- You will also be advised of scheduled, unscheduled maintenance, and patch upgrades.
Historical information is archived for 30 days. This information provides very specific details about current and past incidents, including incident description, impact, updates, and resolution. This data will help you identify patterns that affect your current service levels and whether any future action should be taken to adjust those levels.
You will also see information about the data pools that make up your data centers. The status of each data center displayed on the dashboard represents an aggregation of data pools, products, and entities like our FTP servers. Because of this aggregation, there can sometimes be false-positives displayed at a data center level that may not necessarily affect your application.
In this example, for instance, an incident shows up in only one data pool (red). However, the dashboard may report an incident for the entire data center serving that data pool, even though other data pools, product types, and entities like the FTP server are unaffected.
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This tool is a complementary resource to the existing email and Twitter incident communication process. You can use your Support Portal user name and password to log in and get detailed information: www.successfactors.com/status
Customer Performance Metrics
(For Platinum Experience Customers only)
Another resource—available from early December—in the Cloud Support Portal is the Customer Performance Metrics (CPM) Portal. This portal gives you on-demand visibility into your cloud operations from an application perspective with up-to-the-minute and historical reporting and tracking of key service indicators for availability, performance, and usage.
The data in the CPM portal not only will help you identify response times issues, but also the metrics will help you identify what modules people are using – and which ones they aren’t. This will help you determine if you are getting the full value from your investment in these products as you calculate your service-level compliance, return on investment (ROI), and total cost of ownership (TCO) for the duration of your subscription.
Based on OpTier performance monitoring technology, the CPM tool looks at every transaction at every tier in the cloud, including the application server, database server, and web server level. The tool automatically tracks, stores, and classifies usage data – such as user logins, transactions, page views, and modules – from each level.
Unlike other cloud providers that only provide general non-company specific data, this tool provides you with data unique to your company, your system, and your applications. These metrics will give you clear insights into:
- The overall health and performance of your SuccessFactors applications
- How the application modules are being used
- The number of users that are logging on
- What modules and transactions are used most
- Which attributes of the application are affecting performance
With vital statistics like this on system usage and performance-related data, you can address and escalate issues as needed with our SuccessFactors Customer Success team.
There are four distinct areas in the CPM Portal:
1. Login Reports. These reports let you know how many users have logged in within a certain time period, such as the last seven days. You can also drill down to get more specific information, such as the number of users on an application within the last hour. You will be able to see trends and anomalies, such as high usage days and then drill down to more information to see the exact reason for the spike in activity.
2. Transaction Reports. These reports show the average response time for a certain timeframe (a combination of the datacenter time and the network time), as well as the transaction volume. You’ll also find transaction tables, which list the product modules associated with each transaction so you can see where users are spending the most time in the application. You can also drill down and see more details for the module in the selected time period. The transaction table also shows average times for end user, network, and data center usage. For instance, if response time is high at a particular day and time, you could potentially identify a network or data center issue. Or you may find that the data may simply be an indication of some regularly planned activities, such as yearly compensation updates or end-of-the-month reviews.
3. Page View Reports. These reports are also provided in a chart and table format. The chart shows average page load time, as well as page volume, which is base load time plus content (such as graphics) load time. You can also view this data by time frame and drill down to more detail time periods. The table in this section shows all the pages viewed, and the data can be sorted to see which pages are used the most and which have the longest load time. This helps you determine, for instance, if the load time is affected by the content. As an example, you may see certain kinds of pages that have high response time, which might indicate that a certain page may have a large amount of content. A recruiting page, for instance, might have several videos that take a long time to load, causing users to abandon the page due to a slow response time.
4. Module View. This report allows you to look at module usage over a longer period. You can drill down and get a deeper look at, for instance, the activity within the Recruiting Module, as shown here. You will be able to tell which modules are used most within the application and identify which functionality at a transaction level might be underused. You’ll see which modules are getting the faster and slowest response times. As an example, the analytics module may be getting a slower response time, which would be expected due to the amount of data involved.
Going the distance to serve you
These tools are just two more ways that SuccessFactors provides you with industry-leading customer service. We want you to achieve optimal customer experience and will continue to provide you with other support tools like these in the future.
The Service Status Dashboard is available for all customers, while the CPM Portal is available to select Platinum customers during pilot phase and will be available to all Platinum customers in 2014.
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