Application Performance Engineering Blog - Shunra Software » Software

Web 2.0 impact on Managing Enterprise Applications

anca.popovici — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:41:50 +0000

Application development and delivery faces many new challenges for performance testing in a world of Web Services and Web 2.0 technologies such as mash ups. For successful APM, IT executives now need to manage a bigger picture in terms of defined through practices such as ITIL and COBIT. I was reading an article about how a single user, on average, would utilize 6 servers to create 1 mash-up – and how this really creates a need for better APM. If interested, read this article.

User Experience with Enterprise Web Applications

anca.popovici — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:28:51 +0000

I recently read a very interesting white paper that I found on CIO.com titled “Providing Around-the-Clock Customer Satisfaction.” It focused on how critical APM was to any business where online customer experience can have immediate revenue implications. There are some interesting statistics in the paper noted from a survey done by IDG Research Services on the benefits associated with APM. For example, only 69% of CIO’s consider their organizations to be highly effective in managing problems that impact an application’s availability and performance. Download this white paper (Note: This will redirect you to an external site and registration is required for this paper.)

Replacing Remote Load Generators

Dave Berg — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:25:55 +0000

Have you ever tried to run a test, only to find that your Load Generators half-way around the world are not responding?

If any of that sounds familiar, then you might want to consider using network emulation instead of deploying Load Generators around the globe. By using an emulation solution, you can bring your testing back into a controlled lab environment. The benefits of doing that include:

Repeatability: by controlling your whole environment, you can quickly run and reproduce exactly the tests that you want.
Reduced cost: no need to install and administer remote machines, or the people to maintain them
Reduced time: stable testing environment means less test runs to get reliable results, less setup time – ever try to download a 1GB installer over a slow network?

And many more…

The first question that should come to mind is, “will an emulated solution be as accurate as using the actual production network?” The short answer is yes. The long answer needs to point out that testing over the production network is not “accurate” in the first place. Example: if you run your load tests during off hours, what relevance does that have when the actual users try to work during peak network times? Very little.

If you’re still convinced that you need to model you’re production environment to a high level of accuracy, then you’re still in luck. With network emulation, it is possible to closely model production networks. When measuring on average transaction response time, we typically see correlations around 95%. It should be pointed out that, to get these numbers several runs over the production network are needed so a true average can be understood. When running in an emulated network environment, a single test run is usually sufficient.

Practically speaking, the 80/20 rule applies here as well. If you can get your emulated network to perform at 80% or closer to the actual conditions that your users will operate in, then you’ll be able to far exceed any testing value that you’re getting out of deploying Load Generators around the network.

Remember that network emulation empowers you to return your testing to what it was originally designed to be – a scientific experiment. Once you use network emulation to get all of the variables under your control, you can quickly configure and run tests, troubleshoot, and present results with confidence.