Percona Helps SumTotal Systems Optimize a Busy MySQL Database to Ensure Uptime and Maintain Performance

About the Company

SumTotal provides a unified, comprehensive Learning and Talent Development suite that delivers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle. With SumTotal, organizations can build a culture of learning that is critical to growth, success, and business sustainability. SumTotal’s award-winning technology provides talent acquisition, onboarding, learning management, and talent management solutions across some of the most innovative, complex, and highly regulated industries, including technology, airlines, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals. Skillsoft and SumTotal are partners to thousands of leading global organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies. The company features three award-winning systems that support learning, performance, and success: Skillsoft learning content, the Percipio intelligent learning experience platform, and the SumTotal suite for Talent Development, which offers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle.

The Challenge

The SumTotal database operations team wanted to optimize a busy MySQL environment, which serviced a highly automated application ecosystem. The objective was to identify configuration adjustments and code changes that would optimize hardware utilization. This would also pre-emptively resolve conditions that would have otherwise resulted in internal support cases being raised by the Engineering group.

The Solution

SumTotal engaged Percona’s Consulting team to conduct a comprehensive health and performance audit. A Percona Health and Performance Audit involves reviewing, documenting, and recommending changes to the customer’s full database server stack, including hardware, schema, and queries. The goal is to identify inefficiencies, find problems before they occur, and make sure the database is in the best possible condition to handle future load. A dedicated Percona engineer worked closely with the SumTotal DBAs to conduct this thorough investigation. Percona then delivered a detailed report, which included analysis of the issues and mitigation recommendations. Percona continues to provide SumTotal with ongoing world-class technical support, helping to safeguard application performance by making sure their database meets performance and uptime requirements.

How Percona Made a Difference

SumTotal uses Percona Support services, which are on hand 24x7x365, to assist with urgent MySQL database issues. The Percona support portal has proven an excellent resource for the SumTotal DBAs, acting as a knowledge base and becoming a go-to reference point. Percona’s Health and Performance Audit helped the SumTotal team identify quick wins, as well as providing longer-term optimization suggestions. SumTotal is beginning to explore the value of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). PMM is a best-of-breed open source database monitoring and management solution. It helps users reduce complexity and simplify database management, optimizing performance, and improving the security of business-critical database environments wherever they are located or deployed.