Let me preface my comments below by starting with a fact: We are happy with NetSuite. It was a good decision for our company, but it has not come without some trials.

My company had been using NetSuite for more than 6 months. From time to time there were concerns about performance. Several weeks ago, I attended SuiteWorld 2018. Here is something I learned at the conference that I didn’t know before. And if you don’t know this, you need to.

APM is a bundle that helps you understand where your performance bottlenecks are in any NetSuite transaction. According to the speakers at SuiteWorld, it does not add overhead to a transaction. It simply reads and reports data out of log files that NetSuite collects whether APM is installed or not.

One of my questions to the presenters at SuiteWorld was, “Is it safe to install into production.” They said it should not conflict with other bundles or event scripts. So I bit the bullet and installed directly into production while I was at the conference.

APM stands for Advanced Performance Management. Here’s how it works. After you run any transaction in NetSuite, double-click the NetSuite logo in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. You’ll see a popup that looks like this.

As you can see, it breaks down your response time into various components, letting you find bottlenecks. Total transaction time for my transaction was 7.739 seconds. NetSuite server time (normal NetSuite processing time) was 6.529 seconds. If I’d installed a bundle that injected an event script into my transaction (or if I’d written my own event script), that would be included here as Server Suite Script time. Client scripts show up as “Client” time. Workflows… same. So you can see, there are lots of things that can elongate response times. Some are caused by NetSuite, but some are not.

If you have performance problems, be sure to do your homework before contacting NetSuite. It could be something they can help you with. But just as easily, it could be a self-inflicted wound!