Bb World, the international conference where Blackboard, their partners, and
clients all meet was held in Las Vegas this year, July 14-17.
Bb world included keynotes from some notable people, including Steve Wozniak
and Donna Shalala. I was mostly interested in the technical/sessions, finding
out the future direction of Bb, and Tomcat/Apache under the hood.
The theme of this year's conference - "Ideas into Action".
See the Wordpress Blog
for more highlights.
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Keynote - Steve Wozniak
Wozniak has a long history with Apple Computer, being one of he founders. His
talk focused on the value of education. He discussed his support for teaching
in local schools and he also gave us some of his biographical history.
He emphasized that raw power is not always the best solution but that human
intellect is often the best tool.
He talked about his early days in computer architecture and his goal to get
the most out for the least in. To his advantage, he had no money. He would
design a computer over and over again – from manuals he got. He would try to
improve on the design and save chips.
He also talked about intrinsic motivation based on what people see
(title, salary, awards, things) and the motivation where we do something
because we want to, and nobody pays attention.
He started very first dial-a-joke using Polish jokes (in sf bay) but polish
people there were upset so he changed to Italian jokes.
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Keynote Thursday 8:30 AM
Presenter: Donna Shalala, President of the University of Miami
Changing curriculum is like trying to move a graveyard. Shalala said that 65 percent of Miami courses
are on Bb primarily to manage information and tests. Their disaster recovery
program is hosted by Bb managed hosting. They have used Bb extensively and have
upgraded to 8.0 recently. Donna uses Bb extensively for a class she is teaching. She uses blogs
extensively and uses blog assignments. She uses it to transform the class into
a living document. She teaches policy and Bb is a natural for that. Her syllabus
changes during the class – it is dynamically different throughout the week.
Because the course is interaction, it keeps the students attention. Students are
not required to attend the class but do. The point: she can run a live classroom
on a contemporary issue and her students can be as knowledgeable as anyone in that
area.
There are things on Bb she doesn't need and she gets frustrated. Bb does allow her to
improve the student centered goal. Bb is a tool providing a way to becoming more student
centered. As students gain more confidence in class, they ask more questions but
at the beginning, they feel more free to ask online. She sees the class transform
online.
The new challenges – assessment, assessment, assessment. Accrediting agencies are
asking us to put more assessment in place. Our ability to do this is going to
be critical and critical to the country's willingness to support higher
education. What we are doing has everything to do with the future of the
the country. Most important, our understanding of how critical what we are doing is to the future
of the country. Nobody competes with us at the higher education level. In large
part, because we have been very creative and willing to change. Nobody has our
ability to produce world class leaders, scientists, etc. We've spent five
decades modernizing our institutions and need to spend the next decade shaping
our institutions. We need young people who can adjust to new technologies and
respect traditions. Having people who can adjust 30 years from now is the real
challenge for Higher Ed – how they learn is critical to that new preparation.
Her course is a platform for them to know how to mine through a lot of
information. Preparing young people for their 3rd job, not their first job is the real
challenge. That is the test at the end of the day, and their ability to absorb
technology, respect other cultures, read well and write well.
There are some very good things that will help us. We are changing generations.
The generation behind them was born with computers. A generational
transformation will take place. We are between 3-5 years away from massive
adoption of different ways of using technology in teaching – this will be the
general change.
The improvement in quality. The integration of social networking into the
technology. The students who correct each other are usually right on top of the
subject. Rarely does Donna intervene, she just watches the blog. The student
experience is going to be increasingly team based and 24x7. The Bb platform, which
she is a fan of, gives wonderful opportunities. Her central focus is the
platform. Quality will be improved through social networking.
The Obama campaign employs wide spread use of social networking. She predicts that
Universities will catch on and shape their images carefully using MySpace,
YouTube, and other elements to shape young people's views of those institutions.
Watch what the Yale people are doing. Donna has to drag the students into using
traditional print media.
We are all content producers and publishers. Higher
Ed has had a tougher time because of the way in which we are organized. With the
help of students, we'll transform that picture, and Bb is helping.
When will we transform into a student centered campus, enhance and assess
learning, be a partner with that faculty? We need more leaders to get back to
the classroom. This is very difficult to achieve. The Higher Ed institute of the future will
be using a hybrid model. Donna sees a bright future for Higher Ed in the area of jobs
and the economy will boost Higher Ed.
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Bb Keynotes - Blackboard's Next Generation
Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard and Russ Carlson, President of North America
Higher Education for Blackboard spoke about Project NG (Next Generation), really a buzzword
for Bb next versions (9 and 10).
Some of the successes were mentioned, such as a good ROI at Central Florida because of
distance learning. Columbia, South America is using Bb to train its workforce -
of over 1,000,000 strong, probably the largest in world.
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Project NG
Project NG was built from the ground up with Web 2.0 technologies. It is slated to be the best of Blackboard and WebCT. It
is a multi-year release plan. Bb release 9 is the first codebase with some combined features and Release 10 will be the
finished version. There is a full institutional portal, drag and drop, themes and a new look. Bb NG will have a dashboard view
of courses in one place, summarizes tasks, and have all course announcements aggregated in one area. They will support links to
Sakai, WebCT, and others. They have opened up the APIs to aggregate into a single entry point to the school. Course tasks and
announcements can be rolled up from other LMS as well.
The Instructor Dashboard will include announcements in courses, postings, blogs, journal, alerts(past due), students not online,
and custom alerts. They are also working on SMS and Email methods to receive the alerts. This is a "Needs Attention" item.
Instructors accessing a course for the first time get the "Welcome to your course wizard". Textbook imprints are supported.
The course site can be pre filled with content based on that textbook. Another improvement, the instructor panel is available on
the main course page, not a separate control panel. It is easy for faculty to create and edit this content. The underlying
technology avails of DHTML, and AJAX to drag and drop on the page. Teachers doing development on other Web 2.0 sites
can use a mash up to include Digg, YouTube, etc – directly into the course. They have also added adaptive release for content.
You can also link standards to pieces of content and instructors can add their own standards. CSS allows for development of custom themes so
one could create a unique personal theme. One can also easily design the course menu. The features are also accessible by
keyboard for screen readers.
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Collaboration
Blogs are now supported but Bb goes way beyond a blog. Groups can have blogs, instructors can have them, and other users can
subscribe to them. Bb Journals are used for personal reflection and one on one dialog. Also, a blackboard tool can run
inside of Sakai, and vice versa.
For groups, they will have dedicated spaces with powerful collaboration tools. Group users will have "What's New" in their group,
"What's Due", calendar, and content.
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Other Changes
Some other nice improvements, drag and drop can be used to re-order, there are now twenty assessment question types with visual
elements. One can see the grade center and open an entire assessment for a user.
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You can switch grade center between courses while in one course's grade center.
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There is built in plagiarism protection, a lesson plan feature, activities, pre-selected content and you can include assessments,
other resources like a bibliography. You can run Bb English and run a course in Spanish.
New community features include a Social Learning Space, Facebook integration, Merlot and other custom tabs.
New Content System features include a context menu. There are new portfolio features, and links to artifacts.
One can includes page level comments, and reflections.
The Bb Outcomes System that provides institutional assessment can plan, measure, and improve at all
levels of the institution. Bb Scholar is the best of both. The Scholar can allow connections across institutions.
You can message recipients via map, and other means.
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Admin Panel
The new Admin Panel allows for customization and interfaces with EDUGARAGE. One can empower administrators to
push E-learning out to where students are at. Take Facebook for example. Grades are not sent to Facebook, but a link is
placed there.
Bb for iPhone is in the works (available as of this writing). They are also launching bb for cellphones (SMS). Bb Connect
is a service to receive emergency messages. Also Bb for My Yahoo is in the works and Bb is also being developed for iGoogle.
Bb is creating an open system, empowering faculty to push information out to students, a truly open environment.
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Views from the Field: Rollout of Release 8.0
This session was a panel of system administrators who had deployed Bb
release 8.0. They provided their first-hand experience in upgrading to release 8.
Donna Wicks of Kettering University said Bb 8 was one of the
better versions she had used.
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Setups
Kettering University was using Linux 7.2. The upgrade to version 8 took
20 minutes not including the 2 hours for the DB export.
The University of Cincinnati upgrade took about 6 hours.
Some report 4 hours and at least one used rsync to replicate other
servers.
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Initial Testing
The University of Oregon has two app servers and an Oracle server. They
tested the conversion using a replication of live courses.
The first test conversion took five hours with 1700 courses per term. Their
Oracle server was updated to support 64 bit w/more memory. The app servers
were being upgraded to dual core and now they estimate a 2 hour conversion.
After the test, they did a data comparison between production and test -
to make sure there was no data loss. They tried all different browsers on PC
and Mac. They also had faculty do a "preview". They learned a lot of how
faculty want to use the gradebook, and took notes to help with training.
The beta test program allows one to load a course into Bb's site and do
local testing.
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Rollouts
One school reported that 8.0 will be a clean installation. They will take
requests to move course sites over and won't automatically set up course
shells, just by request. They believe this will help them a lot.
Wayne State University has courses from 1999 and can't get rid of any
data. The old courses are from CourseInfo. They are on 8.0 SP2 (went from Sp1
to Sp2).
At Kettering, there was a little grumbling because they went live a week
before grades were due.
An immediate problem is with IE, auto-refresh - so need to set it to
refresh at every visit.
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This did not come up at Kettering when doing the testing. They have been live
for six months and have had no issues. Things have pretty stable with the
rollout.
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Training Efforts
Wayne State got burned by not doing training in the past. They were part of the
beta test. All of the trainers and support got to go and revamp documentation.
People could preview it. Training people now do custom training at workshops
to get people to go to grade center training. They also have
"Train the Trainer" sessions. They opened up their Q/A system to faculty to
log in and test it. They had a speaker at the Help Desk retreat so they would
be ready for the rollout. They took 5-6 months to get ready.
The University of Chicago is on Bb 6.3. The challenge is to convince
faculty how grade center works. Convincing them to come to training is a
challenge. They refer to it as Learning Opportunities, not training. They will
likely do group and individual sessions every day from August to October.
At the University of Cincinnati, they created documentation on support (one how-to)
and specific guides on commonly asked questions. They have one general guide,
and five focused guides (general guide – using grade center, focused guides -
using calculated columns in grade center, dropping grades, downloading grades,
organizing the grade center, using smart views in the grade center, and giving
extra credit.)
Kettering created a multi-section HTML module – and a tab page module for
within Blackboard. Only two faculty came directly to Donna Wicks, the
Bb Administrator. If you have the community system, use it to your advantage.
She condensed Bb's professional documentation. There was a time savings by
pointing people to certain links.
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Lessons Learned and Successes
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Managing Your System: Techniques and Approaches for the Blackboard Academic Suite
This was presented as a top 10 support faqs. At first, it seemed at a first grade level and I didn't think I would find value but well into it, there was some very useful information.
Bb backups should be daily. Database backups via Oracle. File system backup � especially, content folder, daily. They recommend a test server.
Practice your disaster recovery plan. Test validity of DB and file system backups.
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Technical Tips
To see if system tasks are running, look at the update-dools.log.
Look at blackboard/logs/content-exchange and check date of last five archives to make sure the
logs are rotated.
For LDAP, use one server at setup, then add servers after setup.
Make sure your base search doesn't search unnecessary information.
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Can establish a privileged user (priv_user=true) as in:
ldap.user_fdn.1=CN=bbuser,OU=Users,DC=test,DC=blackboard,DC=com
auth.type.ldap.user_pwd.1=password
auth.type.ldap.user_tag.1=sAMAccountName (type of conecton/container)
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Obtaining Useful Information from Bb Error Logs
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Blackboard Won't Start
If blackboard won't start after an upgrade, what can one do?
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Fixing Bb Beyond Building Blocks
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Patches
What patches are supported?
Note |
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If Java 1.5 is supported for base, then any 1.5 branch is supported. It is the
same with Oracle 10g.
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Building an Environment
How to build an environment for institution for our size?
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Liposuction
Presented by: TBD
Eastern Wash University has 10000 students, 1200 course shells/quarter, 400+
instructors and are now Blackboard ASP hosted.
Digital fat is expensive and unhealthy. The presenters discussed a variety of strategies to
remove digital fat to save tens of thousands of dollars. This was a very creative session.
They burned an order for $ 200,000 in disk costs to make one a hero at work.
Digital fat is electronic content that is excessive in size or no longer active
or unhealthy for other reasons (or all).
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Where Digital is Located
If you have wide adoption of ePortfolio's, you may have a lot of digital fat.
Why care? It is good to have healthy content because it is costly to store (SAN costs), the network is
impacted (pushing in backups), server response time, etc.
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Blackboard Academic Suite Context
Disk space is cheap and you may not want to hassle instructors and have already tried
to change their behavior. It is too complicated to manage the space and we want
to encourage, not discourage the use of Blackboard.
Lets look at an example. One Terabyte = SAN w/1TB retail cost is $33,500 plus $2,000/year for education over 5 years.
This is raw disk space – drop the parity drivers, hot spare, snapshot disk space,
disk space for backups. So, you need 2TB to have 1TB usable, doubling your cost
to $ 75,000. You can gain $ 25,000 in savings if you can trim 1TB.
The Sloan Consortium, predicts a 9.7% growth per year for online enrollments.
Compounded over time, eLearning enrollments will double in 7.5 years. Electrical costs will skyrocket.
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Eastern�s Story
About a year and a half a go, Eastern Kentucky was in the process of moving to Blackboard ASP. Eastern had
an atypical model with high faculty ownership (self enrollments, persistent course
shells) and after moving to ASP, they approaching allotted space limits.
They needed a strategy to address digital fat growth by buying space,
implementing quotas, maintenance procedures, or could just forget about it.
They did a themed approach to get instructor buy-in. This was a multi-phased
implementation including:
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Space Reduction Strategies
Disable assignments, drop box, files attachments for discussion boards, student
file exchange, archive/export via the system control panel. The dropbox is a free
storage place for students as the instructor cannot see them (apparently).
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Instructional Digital Content Ecosystem
The presenter discussed the Digital Content Ecosystem and presented the
following diagram.
Include the graphic here.
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Management Models
This is similar to the business as a grocery store. You have shelf life, an
agreement to remove oldest/least used content off the server,
with the oldest/unused removed first (after notifying customer).
In the system modeled after a hospital, you would have an emergency cut-off.
Which is better?
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Summary
Digital fat is expensive and unhealthy – intervene before a crisis. The costs
for usable space is going up and related gear must be considered. The growth
trend is up, not down.
This institution�s content space went from 177 GB down to 144 GB.
Almost all of their 10000 students touch Bb and they do about 2000 assessments
a day. About half of courses have a Bb presence (they offer 2400 courses).
ITunes is experiencing exponential growth.
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Performance Forensics
Presented by: Stephen Feldman, Blackboard performance expert.
Stephen is responsible for Bb scalability. This talk was on the
science of uncovering performance problems.
Stephen introduced the concept, presented methodology, discussed the importance of
session level analysis, and discussed techniques to arrive at a root cause.
At the end, we should be able to:
A practical definition of forensics would provide for interviewing,
profiling, context of response time, have categories (response latency,
queuing latency).
Stephen presented the following graphics covering the cognition of response
times and the related frustration level. He also illustrated the queuing latency
model.
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Federated Repository
Presented by:
There is a wealth of content on repositories that can benefit educators and learners alike.
The content is not easily discoverable. The Federated Repository Search Tool
intends to solve many issues with discovery/reuse of content for users of the Bb
CMS. Users will have a tool to search external repositories. It can re-use
components using plugin architectures.
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Challenges
Configure add/remove/select with one codebase, talk to each target equally,
and allow for great variety of repositories. Work with any schema type without
customizing at the application level. Aggregate the assets at the Bb UI and run in
Blackboard. Leverage the open source model.
Federated - search multiple repositories simultaneously, create common user
experience.
This is a custom tool when you are in course documents. The version being developed here
is using Web2 technologies (Ajax) rather than the current version's blank page. The user
doesn't have to wait for all results, can browse what is returned.
Images and metadata are returned. The search result can now become a content
item (or multiple results, multiple content items). The descriptive metadata
was pulled and you can also modify it to your liking. You have control of the
repositories that are available in the sys admin dashboard. You can also install
repository plugins. Repositories can also be learning objects.
The project started because of a video project. There exists a database of the repository plugins. The
important thing to know: are the repository implementations known?
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Getting There: Upgrading to Releases Resulting form Project NG
Presented by: Jessica Finnefrock
Jessica has been at Bb for 6.5 years, coming from Prometheus – creator of a cold fusion
application. A huge milestone for Bb is to bring Bb and WebCT together. There
are 130 people in 3 offices in North America on her staff. A third of their project
development staff have been on board for 5 years or longer.
This will be available on webinars and on an FAQ. Server configuration
information will also be on BHB along with sizing guides.
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Project NG is more than one release, starting with Bb 8. Full capability will be realized
with Bb 10. Bb 8 is Bb classic.
Bb 8 has common software as a service extensions through Safe Assign and Scholar. Bb 8
is a stability release – application pack 2. Blackboard 8 classic supports self
and peer assessments, and enhanced gradebook w/smart grading (CE input). They are
using Ajax to allow direct editing of grades. Smartviews have also been added.
Bb 8 also introduces common numbering.
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Upgrade Paths
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Bb 10
Blackboard 10 will include:
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Other Improvements
Bb9 will be the most scalable release to date. It will be lightning fast. Multi-institution support
is on the roadmap.
Bb9 will have 15 languages supported. It also includes the language pack editor
to create language packs, change text on a page in an application/plug in. It also supports the
modification of contextual help information in Bb.
Should participate in the beta program if planning Jan 2009 rollout. Bb 8 should be
considered now – teams ready to help you. Jessica thinks there will be 500 clients on bb8 for fall (08), she
thinks.
A Bb partner with Syracuse University will develop the Sakai connector. This will be open source tool.
System admins have to do a little work to hook it up. Also, instructors will be able to move Ce8 to
Bb 10.
Bb classic 7.3 integration to the Content System is not great at the System Admin level. They are planning
on advancements to the CS to address these issues.
What will happen to building blocks? When upgrading to Bb8 and Bb9, everything
should work but will have new customization. They aren't deprecating those APIs.
Check out sizing guide for information on multiple nodes.
Should be looking at multiple (tomcat) nodes.
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Linux Roundtable
Mike cooling of Sacramento State opened the session. Sac State runs a five node
cluster, and use Oracle RAC.
Mike talked about his experience.
The Oracle parameter kernel.shmmax must be half physical memory if increasing memory on an Oracle
server. Set sga_max_size to 0, sga_target to shmmax. Oracle 10G will tune the others if
you set them to zero.
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Running RAC at Sac State - Mike Cooling
Bb will support Oracle RAC as long as you hire Bb to come out and certify it. SAC did
the work so Bb didn't use the full 88 hours. It has been working great. You can take
the engine down, do BIOS changes, but the application stays up and running. It was a great direction
in which to head. You need to go to an Oracle cluster file system – they chose
OCFS2 and Bb doesn't support AFS. You can see the files from UNIX. With ASM you
are in a captive environment.
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Redhat Linux AS 2 at Kettering University - Donna Wicks
They did go with 64bit and Bb didn't object. They were running on 10g 2.01. They were still
on AS3 but Bb doesn't support 5 but were aware that Donna would be going to 5. She
has clones and did a new install of RH with 5. Installed the O/S in 20 minutes.
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Doug Johnson
Get the listserv address.
They discussed multiple instances of WebLogic on a single server, or multiple
instances on multiple VMWARE instances. UFlorida is using VMWARE and having no
issues.
Java has a memory issue where you can't assign more than 2GB. Consider 3
tomcat servers (cluster on one host).
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One gentlemen said it seemed like they were running separate hosts. The tomcat
cluster is a Bb instance. You can kill one of the tomcat clusters (kill
command), restart one cluster. You can kill a JVM that�s overfilling heap – now
the other two clusters keep going and don't know something is wrong. This kind
of thing is a lot harder to do on a load balancer. When students are taking
tests and you are taking an app server out of the mix, a student might not be
able to complete the test due to shibboleth issues (they use). For maintenance,
its absolutely one of the most helpful things (tomcat clusters). Killing cluster
is usually not noticeable.
Clusters are load balanced to. They use NetScaler that has a grace period (don't
allow new sessions) and everyone gets put over to new machine. Failover would log
everyone out (instant failover) due to shibboleth. One issue, the NetScaler
cookie is valid forever.
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Advanced Performance Forensics
Seven Seconds Blob Steven Feldman's blog.
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Goals
Introduce performance forensics (practice), present argument or session level
analysis, discuss difference between resources and interfaces, and present tools
for performance forensics at different layers in the architectural stack and
client layer. Weight Based Tuning and Analysis.
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Definition of Performance Forensics
Identify the top 10 transactions causing performance issues.
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Measuring the Session
It should happen when a problem statement cannot be developed form data you have
(evidence or interviews) and when you need more data.
You want to do this by minimizing the disruption to production. Use adaptive
collection which is less intensive to more intensive over time.
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Resources vs. Intervaces
This is one of the most critical data points to collect – interfaces are
critical for understanding queuing models, another cause of latency and
timeouts. Resources in turn are critical for understanding transaction cost
(CPU, memory, I/O).
response time = service time + queue time
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Note |
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Quantify of interfaces on waits. Put in contexts the number of interfaces
you have and the time, will help you understand latency and waiting.
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Grand Rapids CC is capturing interface counts across all interface counts
across the stack.
The number one use of resource is memory, due to behavior, application issues
(abandoning session).
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Wait Events
Important for forensics and are used to count latency. Wait event tuning is used to account for latency. Exists in Oracle as 10046. Waits are statistical
explanations for latency and they can help you develop a tuning strategy.
Looking at aggregates and outliers could explain why a performance problem
exists, rather than just looking at one. If sampling directly, you usualy only
have one hour to act on the data.
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Sampling Tools
- HTTP and User experience
- Session and Wait Event
- Cost Execution Plans
- Profilers
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Service time is hard to get.
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There are no tools that will tell you the breakdown. You have to
look at each layer (DB, Disk, Client Rendering, Network, Application time). Also
include analysis by scattered read.
Get more information on Ash and Database Scattered Reads.
Performance Maturity Model - one of the biggest causes of performance
issues is not anticipating growth. Everyone must be involved in performance
issues.
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- Fiddler2
Fiddler2 can measure end-to-end client responsiveness of a web request with
little to no overhead. It captures requests to present httpd codes (200,
302/304,404,500 are important ones), size of objects, sequence of loading ,time to
process the request, and performance by bandwidth speed. It produces a rough
estimation of user experience based on locality. Steven uses it for most of his
performance problems. This tool written by Microsoft. Microsoft is probably the
most open company out there right now, says Steven.
Fiddler2 inspects every detail of the http request. You get breakdown of
requests, geo-locations, statistics. It is good for analyzing dial-up issues and
will compare with a network connections.
Recommends gzip compression at browser level.
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- Cordiant Truesight
This is a commercial tool (expensive). It is used for passive user experience
monitoring – it captures page, object, and session level data. It can define
service level thresholds and automatic incident management. Tracks as if you
were watching over the shoulder. It is exceptional for trend analysis – it is
less intrusive. It�s primary use is for forensic analysis. Similar tools in the
category include the Quest User experience, and
It is a passive network tap, behind the application.
- Log Analyzers
There are both commercial and open source tools available to parse/analyze. Can
provide trend data, client statistica data, http summary info. See notes for
recomendations.
- JSTAT
this is a low intrusive stats collector providing percent of usage by each
region. See the graphic here.
See newsize, max.newsize – see the jvm settings. These aren't set by default and
this can be problematic. the operation of cycling the object out is costly
(Garbage collection). Avoid 99.9 percent in the old space column. FGC will start
increasing. FGCT time will incease. Example: 3 sec of 5 seconds of application
time, not good.
You can plug this recommended tool into the JVM at any time with low impact.
If you believe you have a problem, use these settings:
-VerboseGC and -Xloggc
- IBM Patter Modeling Tool for Java GC
This is a free open source tool for Java. Will graphic output. Will provide a
view of usage and duration.
- JHAT, JMAP and SAP Memory Analyzer
Would use these more intrusive when you are memory bound. This tool helps you
visualize what area of the application is largest consumers of resources. Find
what is using most memory, for example. This is great for troubleshooting
PowerLinks and building blocks.
If JVM is in continuous GC, and you can't explain it, use the SAP Memory
Analyzer.
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- ASH - Active Session History
ASH gives you one hour of data. It runs on the Oracle side. It samples session
activity in the system every second. SessPack and SessSnaper can also do this
kind of thing with Oracle performance.
Hotsauce in Dallas is a low cost conference that is good to learn about open source.
SQL Server Performance Dashboard
- Importance of Cost Execution
Each DB uses an "Optimzer" to determine best execution path for SQL.
You want to get SQL statements and Wait errors. Understanding cost operations on
a particular object can help change tuning strategy (table access by index rowid
for example).
The query cost is the estimated elapsed time in seconds require to complete query
on a specific hardware configuration.
- Windows Tools (RML and Profiler)
These tools are useful for SQL Server. (See slide). There is a heavy overhead
to both. Also consider Quest Performance Analyzer for SQL Server.
- Oracle OEM and 10046
It includes a performance dashboard with great historical and present overview,
access to ADM and ASH simplifies the job of the DBA.
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More Information
http://sevenseconds.wordpress.com
View his resources on www.scholar.com – do Advanced Search" and search by
sfeldman@blackboard.com and tag: 'bbworld08' or 'forensics'.
What are 3 things to look at in Bb performance issue:
Look for clues at the application layer and log artifact to find out if an
interface exists. then look at resource demand at the application container
If the problem is heavily in the application layer, use tools and go to next layer using profiler.
Need trending data – mrtg, snmp based tools. Still comes down to frequency of
your transactions and response time of your transactions. Capture some of the
interfaces – netstat – find out which threads active. Pull some of the data out
of the database.
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Providing Flexible End-User Tools in a System Management Environment
Presented by: Michael Garner, Griffith University, Brisbane
They have 37786 students, 5 campuses - 3 cities. They are running 7.1.3 and the
CS.
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Data Integration
Creates the course sites, manages user accounts, primary portal roles,
assignments of instructors, manages enrollments. This is the same as CPP.
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The Problem
See the table in the notes:
The processes they were using were not scalable. Needed to allow administration
officers, instructors, etc to access pages for manual enrollment. didn't want
users changing the core information – it needed to match with the SiS. domains
were not a good solution, due to problems with roles and permissions.
3.9.3 the Solution
CaSAM (Course and School Administration Module) was created to provide course
and school management within school admin portal tab, control panel, course
assist.
For general staff, they implemented a way to request access through a form
(Building Block). For school administration, they needed to be able manage
courses, staff, and do reporting. They have a school administration function (a
module) with drop down with schools that they are associated with. Then, they
have a course list to pick from. It is easy to locate courses, have a one click
entrance, flag to make available or unavailable, etc. Can easily create a start
date, etc.
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Bb Listening Session
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BOF Content System Administration Best Practices
Moderated by :Dirk Funk
How are you using it?
I gave an overview of how we are using it.
Storing SCORM packages – using locator to copy into course
Assessments as well – template into the CS.
Every document, every course is stored in content system. Move large files
around.
Issue: password box popping up. Might be caused by branding links – requires authentication
again. Sometime you
can turn on cookie based authentication.
SCORM won't read the IMS metadata – useless for htat. Works differently for
those that don't have that.
Do you catalog your objects? Import metadata? DIRK attaches metadata as they
add.
Library started using it for electronic reserves. They hit a wall as it took so
long to open things. They also had a problem with orphaned content.
DIRK had problem with orphaned content – TSM sent a tool to clean it out.
One person said they use it heavily for licensed content, outside materials.
Can limit the availability of tools, etc – across the organization.
track utilization of those resources and can remove those licenses. If link to
outside content piece – create link in content system – teachers link to that,
still have ability to track utilization.
Persistent links is a big deal – you can even change the file name and it still
links to it. Now don't have to go through every course and do a re-link.
One client encourages the use of passes (book content). Pass document around
instead of Email.
How are you handling orphaned content? Tool from Bb from TSM.
One client said they use CS as an asset repository. SCORM packages into an area
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Best Practices for Faculty
Any universities have policies about sharing content between academics
(course). Any success in sharing content? Answer: In one institution, faculty
own their own content. Another: the rights of using it is up to the school.
Dirk – heavier content into content system and shared. At a university level other
issues come into play.
Another : a lot of resistance to understanding collaborative authorship. They've
been trying to push faculty to do more courseware and shared content. Dealing
with legacy thinking, syllabus, intellectual property.
Another: best way to force sharing is to tell them that they cant.
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Effective use of EPortfolio
First year students (7000) have to create portfolio. Already have several
thousands who have created them. That was the driver, portfolio system. They
haven't noticed any performance issues with Portfolios but there are issues
with Portfolios themselves (basic and personal) - want to merge them both but
apparently can't. Because of persistant links, they'll go back to basic.
Its not required but they don't require it so not useful.
See: http://wwwdundee.ac.uk/mypdp
Bb Britian employee: Dundee have a very successfull portfolio program. Under a
creative commons license, they will share that portfolio strategy with
you. One reason was to increase the employability of students. They brought in
career development.
DIRK: whenever needing new course, they create shell with pre-built
pieces/content – comes from other teachers that have contributed to the
repository. It has been really helpful to new teachers.
When you copy a course, the new course is linking to the old course content? One
person does it as an external link – menu is pointed to the content folder
itself!
You wouldn't label content as time specific – said one.
DIRK: use master courses so content is preserved so teacher can modify their own
copy of the master course. Master crse preserved.
It would be a nice option to decide whether or not to copy content links when
copying the course.
Conference conclusion.
University of Toronto – Portfolio project, voice recognitions, executives using
Cell phones to update content
jmart Load test (last presentation before CS)
Ryerson – and CS issues – after last session