Fletcher's Cloud Blog

So, I have been running Service Manager for quite some time now. From SCSM 2010 to SCSM SP1 and most of the CU’s before I upgraded to SCSM 2012 Beta and RC and then to RTM (with the help of a Microsoft TAP Program). Service Manager is now quite entrenched in our business and has been running quite well for a very long time. However, a little while ago we began to experience performance issues with the Console and the logging of calls and the application of Workflows.

Time for some investigation.

There was a general slowdown with everything and business was not happy with this. So let the troubleshooting begin. Since there is a SQL back-end, I decided that this was a good place to start.

I was running a sp_who2 on my SQL server and I was seeing a lot of “blocking” happening. There will some “blocking” for a very short while, while the ServiceManager database is updated. However, I was seeing “blocking” SPID’s consuming processor time for several minutes and this is NOT normal at all.

As a result of this, my workflows were not kicking off properly and a few other issues including the slow pickup of e-mailed in incidents from SMTP “Drop Folder” and extremely slow response when assigning incidents to new people/tiers to name but a few. In general, Service Manager was SLOW!!!!

After much troubleshooting and some help from MS. It was determined to be a corrupt workflow, what had actually happened to me, is that my MP containing my Workflow was corrupted.

So, I stopped the “Health Service”, disabled all the workflows and slowly started re-enabling workflows and then starting the “Health Service” again and slowly started testing like that and I was able to determine that any workflow or template within a set MP was causing the SQL Blocking. As a result, I re-created the workflows and Templates from scratch and now I have no issues at all.

Slow and painful, but well worth it now.

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