In a prior post, I mentioned a new tool – Microsoft’s Visual Round Trip Analyzer ( VRTA).  The Microsoft Global Performance team has developed this innovative tool for visualizing application performance.  Check it out at VRTA.  I have tested it out with a few customer transaction traces and am quite pleased with the concise way it portrays and summarizes performance issues.

This tool is a perfect adjunct to the Shunra Application Performance Analysis Package, for use with VE Transaction Manager or VE Desktop.  It shows the time line of requests, organized by TCP connection.

There is a wealth of detailed information covering pretty much everything that happened on the network during a web transaction.

The most promising aspect of VRTA is the Analysis tab.  It provides a scorecard for the transaction, rated on various metrics.

The rules that are currently evaluated by VRTA are summarized below.  Due to the complex interaction of the browser, browser cache, TCP stack, network, and server it is critical to evaluate these items under expected network conditions.

Here is a VRTA report, running a transaction over a network with 20ms of one-way latency, and 3% packet loss:

Visual Round Trip Analyzer Transaction Score

Each rule links to the underlying transaction data that VRTA used to detect problems.  For example, here is a portion of the output for the “White spaces” rule:

You can download VRTA and give it a try with transactions captured by VETM, VE Desktop Professional, Netmon or Wireshark.

To help analyze Shunra packet captures, a new field-developed Shunra utility is now available from

VETM Whitespace Rule – Output

our support team that can break out individual transactions from within a network capture.

Let me know what you think of VRTA!