4 ways to troubleshoot performance issues in Microsoft Dynamics GP

In your industry, you might experience a slow down at some point within your Microsoft Dynamics GP system. Next, it's troubleshooting time.

This can be challenging to your daily business operations and requires the implementation of a strategic game plan. Without further preface, let’s dive into four ways you can troubleshoot performance issues in your system.

1. Define “slow”: Before finding a solution, understand your issues and how it affects your operations. Did the specific task take significantly longer starting on a certain date? How long does this process normally take? Did anything change in your environment, server or application since this started happening? Is there a certain time of the day that it seems to be worse?

2. Set a benchmark: Take a backup of the database you're troubleshooting and copy it into a TEST database. Run the process on the TEST database and mark down how long it takes.

3. Break it down: There are far too many variables in play with the architecture of Microsoft Dynamics GP to just randomly troubleshoot. By isolating the issue down to a smaller scale, you’ll be able to uncover more clues as to what is causing it and thus be able to put a resolution in place.

• Network - Time the same process directly on a client on the SQL server and then again on a locally installed or RDS client. If vastly different, then I would put your focus on troubleshooting network bandwidth.
• Server – Check server logs, new applications that were installed, windows updates, group policy changes, anti-virus exclusions for database files. Monitor overall server CPU and memory utilization.
• Client Application – Test the issue from two different Microsoft Dynamics GP application installs and compare the results. Remove products from the Dynamic.set file and test again. 
• Database – Check to see if database maintenance is being ran on each database. Check knowledge base articles for potential known issues with Microsoft Dynamics GP or ISV product versions. Start a SQL profile trace to capture more detail on what is going on during this process. Export the results to an Excel spreadsheet and then narrow down the result set by sorting by failures, a specific user or largest processing time of a task. 
• User/Company – does the same slowness happen for all users in all Great Plains companies or not? If yes, then you can rule out a specific user or user security.

4. Document each step of the process: This can be a tedious process that's rarely solved in the first attempt. It usually takes some time to isolate, test and monitor—then repeat this process. The last thing you want to do is start from the beginning and not remember what you have completed in your troubleshooting process.

For more GP tips and tricks check out our webinar session, found in the link below.