ServiceDesk

I'm just curious what others are experiencing as their typical ticket volumes out there, and how well things are holding up for them.  We are running about the following average level:

60 average Concurrent users  1000 new manual tickets a day, 3000 edits a day,  50000 end users, 3000 email notices, 300 new tickets via mailbox feeder...

Hi Nurb4000.

In my setup SD is used mostly by the ICT department and even then that is an up hill battle. We probably get about 100 on a busy day, but these are EMs as the userbase sends emails. Unfortunately many arent classified into IMs for a number of reasons including performance issues with SD7.

What sort of network load do you see on your system? Between the SD7 system and the database it has been as high as 15000 p/s or 40 Mbps. I'd be interested to see how your setup compares.

I havent realy looked much at network load since im on 10G lines( but  i will next week for you ) but our SQL server is also getting hammered to death, both in CPU and san attached disk i/o and the amount of data moving for what should be a really simple process will scare you if you do a SQL trace.

Performance is dismal here as well.

... but these have mostly been attributed to IIS running on the server which is 2003 R2 x64.  After about 3 weeks it virtually grinds to a stop, a quick iisreset and things go back to good.  This has now become a regular maintenance task as a result.

One thing that we had done for us was to put the Change, Problem and Incident workflows into their own IIS application pool and leave the other bits and pieces in the original IIS pool.  This made a noticeable difference but doesn't stop IIS playing up.

We have roughly 40 concurrent users at the moment with an average of 150 new Incidents logged every day, we don't use the email feature in anger just yet.  We plan to expand this to about 200 Service Desk 'analysts' and allowing our 10,000 user estate to log their own tickets.

We have an off-box SQL server which is also our NS SQL server but they sit in the same instance this is 2005 SP3.  I think out of our entire Altiris design SQL is probably the bottleneck.

Interestingly enough though if you run SD in IE 7 or 8 it can be frustrating and appears to 'hang'.  SD in Firefox 3.6 and 4 Beta is very very quick which makes me think that it is something to do with the client-side processing.  I've not spent long trying to qualify this as IE is our corporate standard so I can't advocate Firefox and get away with it :)

2008 here, and i also split the main apps into their own pools from the start. SQL is also off box on a 16core with 48gb ram.

in our case its all due to SQL load/record locks and the WF/Portal servers are loafing. We are going to cluster the webportals, but that wont address the SQL problem.

In our case ie6 would freeze on some machines, but a upgrade to ie8+compatiblity mode fixed them. Others work fine with 6, and we have no ie7's.

I'm hoping 7.1 uses the database more efficiently. I haven't tried it yet and after running SD7 I'm not keen on using an official beta after the grief with the full version. Hopefully it is released soon and I can run SD7.1 with my current NS.

what i have noticed is that with a generic contact, the search gets slower and then we have to merge contacts and recreate the generic contact. we do a lot of guest calls/tickets. so when the count gets to around 40000, i have to merge the generic VenPalGuest contact so that the query doesnt take so long to look up the contact and select it.

hope this helps ... joe

In our case the contacts are legit ( most in there now are straight out of Active Directory ) and we don't use the 'generic' account at all. In the mail feeder i have changed the 'process message' section to create new contacts instead of using the generic default when they are not found.

In our old v6 help desk in about 4 years after a database 'refresh', we had over 200k contacts due to a combination of non AD users we support and high turnover/transfer rate. Also, due to planned 'expanded services' taht SD is supposed to offer us, i expect to hit 500k fairly quickly.