In today’s business environment it is imperative that mission critical applications remain both highly available and responsive to serve the needs of the target user population. Intellicon Solutions’ performance tuning services employ a proven methodology for simulating, testing and analyzing system performance using a variety of techniques and tools, including Intellicon’s System Monitor product, as well as industry-standard commercial applications. Testing takes into account hardware, software and network components. The results are collated, analyzed and reported to identify bottlenecks and areas of concern. Specific tuning recommendations are then delivered that will result in real improvements in application efficiency and performance.
Intellicon’s methodology covers load, stress, scalability and profile testing and tuning. Each of these components includes the following key elements:
- load testing simulates system load over time, as simulated users perform a series of pre-defined activities on the application, repeatedly executed and designed to touch the breadth of functionality available.
- stress testing determines the stability of the application and exposes any potential flaws in system stability and reliability as a consistent maximum simulated load is performed over an extended period of time.
- scalability testing determines the behavior of performance and system stability over multiple test runs as an iterative process of adding or removing system hardware and resources is conducted.
- profile testing identifies any potential bottlenecks in the code base and reports code level execution time, memory usage, etc. Intellicon products and 3rd party profiling applications are used for profiling and tuning.
Tuning recommendations that result from the testing may include, as an example, improved server hardware specifications (processors, size, speed, memory, etc), database configurations, architecture design and layout, Web and application server settings, and ongoing maintenance specifications.
Intellicon Solutions’ System Monitor product is a customized application data collection agent that measures status and response time metrics. This key information will help business owners in analyzing specific application behavior in production environments. The collected data can be used effectively to ensure that proper system resources have been allocated, and to correlate to specific periods of time where users are reporting application issues. The System Monitor product can be utilized for any OLTP system, including eLearning/Learning Management System applications or any other application where performance and scalability are business-critical issues.
Some current features of Intellicon’s System Monitor include:
- Network Latency Measurements – measure TCP/IP network latency between a remote region of your choice and a list of servers. Using simple trend analysis, identify periods where internal/external networks are contributing to degrading response times.
- Web-Based Response Time Measurements – using the HTTP protocol, execute an actual click-path against your target application. Response times collected are actual times an end user would experience when accessing the application. Measure such transactions as Login, Search, Launch an external product, or any other HTTP based transaction you wish to track.
- Data Repository in CSV format for easy reporting – all data measurements are stored in standard CSV format for easy plug-in into such tools as Microsoft Excel, Crystal Reports, etc, for highly flexible reporting.
- Reporting Capabilities – using the System Monitor Data Repository will allow you to create any kind of trend report you could possibly need.
Sample trend report from Intellicon’s System Monitor:
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