Application Performance Management Blog – Shunra Software

“How do we know that the Shunra VE models that we use in our tests are up to date?” I am often asked this question by application testing teams who find themselves using Shunra VE in their testing lab every few weeks. These people are not responsible for maintaining the models and often don’t have visibility into network changes that may require updates to the model.

The concern is that since the enterprise network is so dynamic, a test that uses old data in the model will not accurately reflect the expected performance over current network conditions.

I want to share with you two ways to be confident that your network models are up to date.

Both options use VE Network Catcher. This is a tool that supports the capture of network conditions from various links which can then be played back during a test. VE Network Catcher supports a 24/7 recording of up to 100 links.

The first and easier approach that I suggest is to record your WAN behavior (methods will be described in future how-to posts) prior to running a test. This is simple enough if all we want to verify is that recent network changes are reflected in the model. However, if the concern is that the dynamic nature of the enterprise network may introduce conditions that vary on a daily or monthly basis, then a more detailed approach is needed which includes reviewing the network data since the last update and creating a range of link profiles reflecting the best, average and worst case scenarios. This approach allows the tester to generate a performance range, which is a best practice that I will elaborate on in a future post.

The process of building link profiles from historical data, although not too time consuming, may still be more than what a testing team will want to be bothered with prior to a test. A substantial number of links in the model can also make this very time consuming. This brings me to the second approach for being confident that the network models are up to date – use the new Shunra consulting service to keep these network models up to date. This is a new service that was built based on customer requests which provides the following:

A Shunra VE consulting professional will build the network models for each site to reflect a range of network conditions, including the best case scenario, average case scenario and worst case scenario. The process of setting up these models utilizes data from Shunra VE Network Catcher as well as from additional network monitoring tools that the client may have in place such as SolarWinds, CiscoWorks, HP OpenView, etc.

Once a month, a Shunra VE consulting professional will update the VE models with data from the past 30 days, including best case, average case and worst case conditions, so all the network models for all the sites are reflecting recent conditions on an ongoing basis. This relieves application testing and network performance teams from managing those models and allowing them to focus on testing, confident that they are always using the most up to date models.

In summary, VE Network Catcher allows testers to keep Shunra VE models up to date with the latest network conditions. Utilizing the new service by Shunra consulting services these models can be refreshed and updated on an ongoing basis allowing testing teams to focus on executing tests.

A demo version, VE Network Catcher Lite, is available online so give it a try.