If you call BPOS technical support for anything but a password reset, be prepared. With a few exceptions, the person you are talking to has had less technical experience than India call centers that are following a script and telling you to reset your computer.
After at least 100+ phone calls over the past six months, I've learned a few things that will hopefully be helpful to others:
1. If you get a hold of someone that has helpful quickly and effectivly, get their names. Next time you call in for another issue, ask if they are available or can call you back. The call center reps have a chat client (probably communicator) that they can lookup and chat with other employees.
2. The older your ticket gets, surprisingly, the less attention it appears to receive. You would figure that the ticket would show up as a higher priority on their system, but it doesn't appear to be the case.
3. If a ticket you create ends up getting pushed to "operations", don't relax. Usually the ticket will get kicked back with little or no information. You will end up getting a call from a different representative than you originally worked with, and he/she will know little to nothing about your issue. If the issue isn't resolved, make sure to ask to be put back in touch with the original representative that you opened the ticket with (see #1). Otherwise you are more than likely going to waste an hour repeating everything that has happened with the ticket, and the new representative will probably repeat any mistakes already made that the original rep would have at least skipped past.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
IIS7 activity and watching active connections... how to figure out what's slowing down your web server
Hopefully this will save someone the headaches we went through a few times already.
Here is an easy way of figuring out what requests/webpages are crashing, slowing down, taking up a lot of CPU, or just taking a long time on your IIS 7 Web Server:
1) Open IIS Manager.
2) Highlight (click) machine name in the "Connection" pane on the left. For me, it's right below "Start Page".
3) In the Features View Pane on the right, click on "Worker Processes" icon. If you don't see the icon it probably means you selected something other than the machine name in the "Connections Pane"
4) At this point you will be able to see which website (by application pool name) is taking up all the CPU.
5) Double click on the application pool to get ALL the info you need to figure out what webpages/scripts are being requested, as well is who is calling them and for how long they have been running!
Maybe I wasn't using the right key words, but I tried searching for:
IIS7 Active Connections
IIS7 Current Connections
IIS7 Current Sessions
IIS7 Current activity
IIS7 Activity Monitor
I'm sure it my fault for using the wrong google queries, but a lot of the results were people asking for exactly the information the worker process pane provides! And yet nobody was saying to just look at Worker Processes. Instead the forums are full of suggestions to use Tracing and Performance Monitor.
If you are trying to figure out how many active web connections each of your web farm servers are running, you should be using Performance Monitor. If you are trying to figure out why a particular request fails, you should be using Tracing (I have yet to get a trace to actually reveal easy to understand and helpful information). However, if you just want to find out what web activity is currently going on with your IIS server, follow the directions above.
I hope this helps somebody (or maybe everyone already knew this but me?)
Here is an easy way of figuring out what requests/webpages are crashing, slowing down, taking up a lot of CPU, or just taking a long time on your IIS 7 Web Server:
1) Open IIS Manager.
2) Highlight (click) machine name in the "Connection" pane on the left. For me, it's right below "Start Page".
3) In the Features View Pane on the right, click on "Worker Processes" icon. If you don't see the icon it probably means you selected something other than the machine name in the "Connections Pane"
4) At this point you will be able to see which website (by application pool name) is taking up all the CPU.
5) Double click on the application pool to get ALL the info you need to figure out what webpages/scripts are being requested, as well is who is calling them and for how long they have been running!
Maybe I wasn't using the right key words, but I tried searching for:
IIS7 Active Connections
IIS7 Current Connections
IIS7 Current Sessions
IIS7 Current activity
IIS7 Activity Monitor
I'm sure it my fault for using the wrong google queries, but a lot of the results were people asking for exactly the information the worker process pane provides! And yet nobody was saying to just look at Worker Processes. Instead the forums are full of suggestions to use Tracing and Performance Monitor.
If you are trying to figure out how many active web connections each of your web farm servers are running, you should be using Performance Monitor. If you are trying to figure out why a particular request fails, you should be using Tracing (I have yet to get a trace to actually reveal easy to understand and helpful information). However, if you just want to find out what web activity is currently going on with your IIS server, follow the directions above.
I hope this helps somebody (or maybe everyone already knew this but me?)
Thursday, July 14, 2011
This to keep in mind when considering BPOS or Office 365
Please keep in mind, I'm writing this as a BPOS (business productivity online suite) user and it's based on my current information. Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of the information below so I can update the post.
I'm a big fan of the idea behind BPOS and when the platform works well it's definitely worth it. However, I wanted to let people know these few cavaets in regards to switching to the service from an inhouse solution. There are a few things I realized I missed a lot only after migrating our company infrastructure.
Exchange:
- There is no way for you to look up internal logs of emails sent between users. So if user ben@yourdomain.com emails jeff@yourdomain.com and comes to you saying they sent an email but the Jeff never received it, outside of looking in their sent mail and the other users inbox, you really can't do anything accept call BPOS and ask them to dig into it.
- You have no way of monitoring email behavior. You can't tell if one person is emailing a lot, or even spamming, nor can you setup warnings if there is any specific activity. So if you have a user that's spamming, you have to hope that internal Microsoft alerts catch him/her before they ruin your email reputation (for the domain, not sure about IP reputation).
- Want to find out who has been emailing a certain user? Again, without just going into their exchange inbox/sent items, you can't do a search. There is an audit tool available online in the ForeFront admin portal, but it requires that you know the domain of both the sender and recipient, so you can't just do a query and see all the emails that someone received (or sent).
- It's slow. Emails are frequently delayed and waiting as long as a minute for an email someone sent you is not uncommon. This applies not only to external emails coming into BPOS, but internal company emails as well. So if you are on the phone with someone and they say "check your email, I just sent you something", give it a little bit of time.
Livemeeting:
- You do not get a call in option for your livemeetings. Unless you combine your Livemeeting service with a third party conference call service, the only way people can get into the meeting and get audio is through their computer speakers/headset. Not sure about other companies, but our C level and upper management users are very unhappy about this. Also, the third party solution isn't fully integrated, even if you go with it, someone still has to be a manager and create conference bridges that can be sent out. Basically, if your employees want to create conferences on whim that allow people to call in, it's not possible. They will still need to get a phone number or a time from whomever is in charge of the telephone conference setup.
Communicator:
- Audio calls rarely work between users not on the same network. I'm assuming this is due to a SIP call being setup between the two clients directly (unlike chat, which goes through the Microsoft BPOS Office Communicator Server). Due to firewall issues, there are frequently issues when attempting to setup a SIP connection between two clients on different networks. Unless all your offices are linked via VPNs, or everyone is in the same office, be prepared for issues. Last ticket we create with Microsoft for this, they came back and told is it is simply unsupported. Technically, we were told all the clients need to be on the same domain, but I really doubt it has anything to do with the domain, and relates more to "the same network", which is usually what you have when everyone is on the same domain.
I'm a big fan of the idea behind BPOS and when the platform works well it's definitely worth it. However, I wanted to let people know these few cavaets in regards to switching to the service from an inhouse solution. There are a few things I realized I missed a lot only after migrating our company infrastructure.
Exchange:
- There is no way for you to look up internal logs of emails sent between users. So if user ben@yourdomain.com emails jeff@yourdomain.com and comes to you saying they sent an email but the Jeff never received it, outside of looking in their sent mail and the other users inbox, you really can't do anything accept call BPOS and ask them to dig into it.
- You have no way of monitoring email behavior. You can't tell if one person is emailing a lot, or even spamming, nor can you setup warnings if there is any specific activity. So if you have a user that's spamming, you have to hope that internal Microsoft alerts catch him/her before they ruin your email reputation (for the domain, not sure about IP reputation).
- Want to find out who has been emailing a certain user? Again, without just going into their exchange inbox/sent items, you can't do a search. There is an audit tool available online in the ForeFront admin portal, but it requires that you know the domain of both the sender and recipient, so you can't just do a query and see all the emails that someone received (or sent).
- It's slow. Emails are frequently delayed and waiting as long as a minute for an email someone sent you is not uncommon. This applies not only to external emails coming into BPOS, but internal company emails as well. So if you are on the phone with someone and they say "check your email, I just sent you something", give it a little bit of time.
Livemeeting:
- You do not get a call in option for your livemeetings. Unless you combine your Livemeeting service with a third party conference call service, the only way people can get into the meeting and get audio is through their computer speakers/headset. Not sure about other companies, but our C level and upper management users are very unhappy about this. Also, the third party solution isn't fully integrated, even if you go with it, someone still has to be a manager and create conference bridges that can be sent out. Basically, if your employees want to create conferences on whim that allow people to call in, it's not possible. They will still need to get a phone number or a time from whomever is in charge of the telephone conference setup.
Communicator:
- Audio calls rarely work between users not on the same network. I'm assuming this is due to a SIP call being setup between the two clients directly (unlike chat, which goes through the Microsoft BPOS Office Communicator Server). Due to firewall issues, there are frequently issues when attempting to setup a SIP connection between two clients on different networks. Unless all your offices are linked via VPNs, or everyone is in the same office, be prepared for issues. Last ticket we create with Microsoft for this, they came back and told is it is simply unsupported. Technically, we were told all the clients need to be on the same domain, but I really doubt it has anything to do with the domain, and relates more to "the same network", which is usually what you have when everyone is on the same domain.
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