Live Nation - Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Optimization on AWS Cloud Environment

Live Nation is the largest live entertainment company in the world, connecting over 570 million fans across concerts and ticketing platforms in approximately 44 countries.

Other operations include:

• Producing live music concerts, connecting nearly 93 million fans to almost 35,000 events for over 4,500 artists in 2018
• Live Nation owns, operates, has exclusive booking rights for or has an equity interest in 237 venues, including House of Blues® music venues and prestigious locations such as The Fillmore® in San Francisco, the Hollywood Palladium, the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, 3Arena in Ireland, Royal Arena in Copenhagen and Spark Arena in New Zealand
• Live Nation’s artist management companies manage music artists and acts across all music genres. As of December 31, 2018, they had nearly 110 managers providing services to more than 400 artists
• It is the world’s largest music advertising network for corporate brands and includes one of the world’s leading ecommerce websites
• The world’s leading live entertainment ticketing sales and marketing company, (based on the number of tickets sold) through www.ticketmaster.com and www.livenation.com and other websites, numerous retail outlets and call centers, selling over 480 million tickets in 2018
• Ticketmaster serves approximately 12,000 clients worldwide across multiple event categories, providing ticketing services for leading arenas, stadiums, festival and concert promoters, professional sports franchises and leagues, college sports teams, performing arts venues, museums and theaters
• Live Nation is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the symbol “LYV.”

The Company decided to standardize not only the dev/ops but also all of their mission critical databases and migrate everything to AWS, including their Oracle workloads. Initially, EBS performance suffered. They engaged mLogica to analyze the issues impacting Oracle/E-Business Suite performance on RDS and help pinpoint the problems and root causes of the application slowdown.

By doing an initial high-level analysis, the mLogica team identified concurrency issues seemed as the cause of the problems, and recommended that health checks be performed at two places for the concurrency issues – the database configuration and the EBS application itself, including bugs. The latter seemed to be the most likely source.

Consequently, the team carried out an extensive and in-depth diagnosis on the database and the application environment, including reviews of:

• Architecture layout
• AWR reports of DB and OS performance
• Database and OS patch levels
• Database parameters
• The optimizer features that were in use against the most recent available and recommended updates

The mLogica team, working closely with the Company’s IT team, produced a number of best practices recommendations, with the key being:

• Implement Linux HugePages
• Evaluate recommended database patches for application
• Review table and index degree values for maximizing parallel processing
• Evaluate other optimizer features
• Provide the Company’s IT team with a list of available patches to prevent possible issues

The Company benefited from mLogica’s experienced Oracle and AWS Architects who have extensive database optimization experience. They reviewed both the database and the applications to identify the root causes of the performance issues, provided key recommendations to resolve the issues. mLogica also put into place some established best practices and guidelines for the Company to review on a regular basis. They underscored the importance of applying various latest patchsets recommended as necessary, redistributed server loads for higher availability, and optimized the Company resource allocation.

The Senior Vice President of Global IT at the Company said: “The optimization health checks that mLogica conducted with our Company, was very helpful and is a great story to tell as part of our overall AWS migration successes.”

The Company’s operations team got a repeatable set of steps that they could use to keep their environment optimized going forward. With a better understanding of their system and its parameters, they are now working towards fully implementing the recommendations.

With mLogica, they feel they have a trusted partner to provide them the necessary support when they need it.

1. Tuning on RDS for EBS is always an issue. Success requires that the consultant have both Oracle AND Amazon expertise on staff
2. mLogica fixed the problem AND trained the Live Nation IT department to manage the issue independently