Performance Guidelines

This section provides a number of performance-related guidelines and recommendations to take into account when implementing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Cloud Service. This includes guidelines related to the following:

• Benchmarking, Scalability, Elasticity and Performance

• User Interfaces

• General Topics

Benchmarking, Scalability, Elasticity and Performance

Oracle Utilities cloud services such as Billing Cloud Service, Customer Care and Billing Cloud Service, Customer Cloud Service (with Advanced Meter Solution) and Meter Solution Cloud Service are important components of a utility's solution set, and are:

• Mission critical in terms of revenue generation

• Highly configurable as many aspects of the solution are designed to be configured to meet market specific requirements

• Compute intensive, as many validation and calculation rules need to be applied during daily processing

• Time sensitive, as processing must be completed daily, on schedule and within a predefined (and strict) batch window

These cloud services have been designed and built from the ground up with all of these concepts in mind, but successfully implementing and operating them depends on a shared responsibility model with respect to Benchmarking, Scalability and Performance.

Who is Responsible for Scalability, Elasticity and Performance?

This is a shared responsibility between Oracle and the customer/implementer.

Oracle is responsible for the following in terms of the base cloud service:

• Scalability

• Elasticity

• Benchmarking

• Configurability

• Extensibility

• Performance of base product functionality, including:

• Embedded infrastructure and platform services

• Application framework

• Base product features and functions

• Configuration Migration Assistant

• Data Migration Tools

• Generalized/Specialized Data Extract

To verify the above, Oracle performs regular scalability benchmarking to confirm general solution scalability and elasticity, including:

• Vertical (scaling up), such as effectively utilizing more power (CPU, RAM, etc)

• Horizontal (scaling out), such as effectively utilizing more machines/servers

This scalability benchmarking is run on reference configurations and on very high data volumes, for example:

• 10M Billable Service Customers (CCS)

• 20M+ Utilities Device Data Channels for (MSCS)

The customer/implementer is responsible for the following in terms of the specific implementation:

• Performance optimization of customer configuration & extension logic

• Correction of customer data issues

• Functional testing

• Performance testing (initial and regression)

• Analysis of performance related issues

Customers/implementers should plan to run performance testing to verify that a their final configuration (that is, the implementation specific workload) meets expectations and preserves general solution scalability and elasticity.

Performance testing is:

• Executed by the customer/implementer

• Uses customer specific (final) configuration

• Run on final expected customer data migration volumes and so requires data migration to be complete, configuration to be finalized / functionally tested, and the solution running in a production sized environment (a full sized Test environment is provided for this purpose)

User Interfaces

• Zones: For better performance, user interface zones should be initially collapsed when not required for 90% or more of business processes. The initial state of zones (collapsed or not) can be controlled via the Portal Preferences tab on the User portal.

• Number of Records: The number of records returned to the user interface for a zone should be limited to 50 rows when building custom zones against large transactional tables.

• Screen Troubleshooting: To troubleshoot a screen in the user interface, click Preferences in the top right corner of the application and choose the Portal Preferences tab. Choose the appropriate portal and set all zones to "Initially Collapsed". Navigate back to the screen that has performance issues, expand the zones one by one, and measure the execution time of each zone. This should be an accurate step-by-step representation of the full screen execution.

• Performance Optimization: For optimal user interface performance, laptop users should ensure their computer is in high performance mode.

General Topics

• Solution Updates: Oracle should be consulted before significant solution changes are made. For example, configuration and solution extensions, adding a large number of customers, network changes, new integrations, etc.