Leading Oil & Gas Innovator, NOV Excels with Real-Time Drilling Data After Load Testing

Anastasia Ostapenko

NOV, a renowned global provider of equipment, components, and IT products for the oil and gas industry, which is located in Texas, USA, empowers extraction companies worldwide with innovative technological solutions that enable the safe and efficient production of abundant energy while minimizing environmental impact.

Under its CTES brand, NOV offers a range of IT products, including coiled tubing monitoring devices, data acquisition systems, and modeling software. The company’s reputation and customer trust are directly tied to the reliability and consistency of these products’ performance.

Challenge

The extraction of known oil and gas deposits becomes increasingly challenging year after year, with new fields being harder to reach. Innovations play a crucial role in addressing these challenges by:

One of NOV’s promising products aimed at enhancing production efficiency is CTES Max Completions. This tool offers real-time data via a proprietary completions data manager, aligning disparate data sources on a completions site to provide contextualized insights.

However, real-time data often comes with performance challenges. During a standard development process, the NOV team identified potential performance issues when users open multiple dashboards with technical data from well devices.

Solution

With limited internal competencies and a shortage of available performance engineers, Steve Opel, NOV’s Principal Technology Manager, sought assistance from PFLB for performance testing. The primary goal was to find a tool that could consistently emulate the specific load on Max Completions, replicate performance problems, and identify any potential bottlenecks. This would enable NOV to optimize performance effectively.

Results

Working closely with the NOV team, PFLB engineers developed a customized testing methodology. They set up their in-house tool, PFLB, to perform load and stress testing. The tests revealed that at a specific load level, the system became non-scalable due to a bottleneck in the SQL Server database’s interaction with the application server, caused by multiple Async Network IO wait events.

Benefits

Hiring an external team for a limited period proved cost-effective. The performance bottleneck was identified and localized, providing valuable insights that informed optimization decisions.

Additionally, the NOV team gained the capability to conduct performance testing independently after project completion, further reinforcing their reputation as a reliable products’ provider.

About PFLB

PFLB is a cloud-based load testing solution that helps businesses identify and fix performance issues on time. PFLB has proven efficient across various industries, including Oil & Gas. For more information about our capabilities, please, contact sales.