Essentra plc is a global manufacturer and distributor listed on the London Stock Exchange. When invisible performance drains threatened the stability of its Dynamics 365 platform, the company turned to XPLUS Performance Monitoring — and started resolving long-standing issues within hours, not months.
| Industry | Global manufacturing & distribution of essential components |
| Headquarters | Kidlington, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom |
| Platform | Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations – multi-entity, multi-region |
| Solution | XPLUS Performance Monitoring (SaaS) with proactive expert support |
| Key Outcome | Persistent issues resolved in hours; proactive health management; reduced operational risk |
resolved on first deployment day
eliminated in a single session
to one user, escalated same-day
Essentra operates a complex, multi-entity Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations landscape that spans several countries and business units. As the platform matured and transaction volumes grew, the IT leadership team found itself in an increasingly reactive posture: performance problems surfaced only when end-users reported slowdowns, and root-cause analysis with standard Microsoft tooling rarely went deep enough to deliver answers.
Some issues had been known for months — visible in their symptoms but invisible in their causes. The database was growing faster than expected, batch jobs were behaving erratically, and the team lacked the SQL-level diagnostic visibility needed to act with confidence. Standard monitoring tools showed that something was wrong; they could not show why.
Essentra needed a solution that could sit alongside its existing Microsoft stack, provide deep and continuous insight into the database layer, and empower its own architects to investigate and resolve problems without waiting for lengthy development cycles.
XPLUS Performance Monitoring was deployed as a lightweight SaaS layer on top of Essentra's Production and UAT environments. The tool required no changes to application code — it operates through configurable, read-only diagnostic scripts that feed data into Azure-based dashboards accessible directly by Essentra's IT team.
Onboarding was supported by an XPLUS system architect who configured the environment, set up baseline monitoring, and trained the team on how to extend the tool with their own custom queries. Within days, Essentra's architects had a real-time window into database blocking, batch performance, query cost, and storage consumption — visibility they had never had before.
The engagement began with a one-month free trial, followed by a structured three-month proof of concept designed to demonstrate measurable value against real production issues.
The impact was immediate. Within the first weeks of deployment, the Essentra team independently identified and resolved three significant issues — each of which had previously resisted diagnosis through conventional tools.
A persistent database-blocking problem in the credit management module had been known since at least October 2025. Despite repeated investigation, the root cause remained elusive. On the first day of the XPLUS deployment, Essentra's technical architect opened the blocking dashboard and immediately identified the pattern: eight duplicate batch jobs were running the same cross-company process simultaneously every six hours, each competing for the same database resources. Seven redundant copies were removed on the spot. A problem that had persisted for months was resolved in a matter of hours.
I solved this problem on the day the performance tool went into production. I had been aware that there was a problem since at least the beginning of October 2025 but could never get to the bottom of it.
The production database was growing at an alarming and unexplained rate. Using XPLUS, the team discovered that a single system table — intended to hold temporary user alerts — had silently ballooned to over 87 million rows, consuming approximately 370 GB of storage. By adding a custom diagnostic query through the tool's built-in scripting capability, the team pinpointed the cause within minutes: a misconfigured alert rule was generating more than 500,000 records per hour. Additional orphaned rules — including those configured for employees who had long since left the company — were compounding the problem. The offending rules were deleted, and the runaway growth stopped immediately.
I couldn't have gotten to the bottom of this problem so easily were it not for the XPLUS tool. The only alternative would have been to wait for the next release cycle to build something similar inside the application.
A routine review of the XPLUS performance dashboard flagged an unfamiliar query consuming over 8.5 billion logical reads in just six hours — an extraordinary volume. By correlating the XPLUS telemetry with Microsoft's standard application logs, the team traced the problem to a single end-user in one legal entity who was repeatedly opening a stock transactions form via a saved browser bookmark. The bookmark bypassed all standard filters, forcing a full table scan across millions of records with every page load. Each execution took seven to nine minutes. The issue was escalated to the Centre of Excellence team with a clear, data-backed recommendation — something that would not have been possible without the combined visibility of both monitoring layers.
The partnership between XPLUS and Essentra extends well beyond performance monitoring. Essentra has been using Testing by XPLUS — a SaaS-based test automation platform — across all of its legal entities to validate rollouts and system upgrades, ensuring stability at every release cycle. Performance Monitoring is a natural extension of that relationship: a shared commitment to operational confidence across the full Dynamics 365 lifecycle.
Essentra is exactly the kind of partnership we build our observability practice around — a technically ambitious client that expects real answers, not dashboards full of noise. The work we've done together proves that deep ERP visibility isn't a luxury; it's a prerequisite for operating at scale with confidence.
I've been using the performance monitor tool extensively and been able to identify and resolve a few issues with it, at least one which I likely wouldn't have been able to solve without it.
About Essentra
Essentra plc is a global manufacturer and distributor of essential components and solutions, listed on the London Stock Exchange. Headquartered in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, the company serves customers worldwide through a complex, multi-region supply chain underpinned by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations.
essentraplc.com →Request a demo to see how continuous performance monitoring and proactive expert support could work in your own D365 environment.
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