Performance monitoring

Performance monitoring
Performance testing often concentrates on new or changed systems. These may form just one part of the IT infrastructure within an organization. The following questions can be answered only by taking a broader approach:

Will end-to-end application performance always remain satisfactory ? Will all SLAs (service-level agreements) continue to be met ? What additional load will be imposed on the network ? When will additional hardware be needed ?

Acutest provide performance monitoring services to address these performance issues before operational service begins.

Acutest can recommend performance monitoring tools to suit the needs of your organization. These include:
• Mercury SiteScope - monitoring solution to ensure availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures
• Compuware Vantage - performance monitoring including application, network and server monitoring
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance.
Additionally, we can provide expertise to model system performance and capacity based on performance testing work carried out before launch.
Performance tuning
Many organizations need to obtain optimum performance from their existing IT systems, as they are constrained from making hardware changes solely to improve performance.

Tuning IT systems is not a simple exercise – there is usually a balance between performance improvements, throughput requirements and impact on your finite hardware resources.

Acutest can provide performance tuning services to recommend how best to tune IT systems balancing all these factors. This can often be done as part of a planned load test – saving you time and money.

We also recommend testing as early as possible in your development life-cycle to eliminate performance issues. The benefits from this approach are often achieved by appropriate use of profiling and tuning tools integrated into the development process. These are often used in conjunction with performance testing tools.

Acutest can recommend performance tuning tools and services to suit the needs of your organization. These include:
• Mercury Tuning - Outsourced Performance Validation Service (formerly ProTune).
• Mercury Diagnostics - Drill-down from business processes into J2EE, .NET and ERP/CRM applications.
• Compuware DevPartner - Development, debugging and tuning for Java, .NET, web-enabled and distributed applications

Performance problems in operational IT systems and software applications are costly both in terms of business disruption and remedial work. These issues tend to go undetected prior to launch because of the difficulty of conducting realistic performance testing.

We have created our Performance Testing Service to address this problem before you launch. Through the use of proven, advanced techniques, a structured testing approach and appropriate performance testing tools, we will reduce the risks of performance failure for new or enhanced applications.

Our performance testing service elements include:
• Load and stress testing
• Scalability and volume testing
• Endurance and soak testing
• Performance testing tool evaluation
• Performance monitoring and tuning
For a short explanation of these testing terms visit load testing and other types of non-functional testing

Our services are suitable for performance testing:
• Software applications (including web-enabled applications and systems)
• IT systems (including embedded systems)
• Infrastructure (including the network)
• Multi-tiered solutions that include a combination of applications, IT systems and infrastructure.
Mercury SiteScope
• Do you need to ensure infrastructure availability and performance across a wide range of hardware, operating systems, applications, and technologies?
• Do you need a customizable solution that supports real-time views, alerting, reporting and even technologies such as web services and XML?
• Is agent-based monitoring proving to be expensive to deploy, install, maintain, manage, and support? And does it cause unnecessary overhead and instability on production systems?
• Are large monitoring frameworks not delivering the value and return on investment you had expected?
Mercury SiteScope® is the industry’s first and leading agentless monitoring solution designed to ensure the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures — e.g., servers, operating systems, network devices, network services, applications, and application components. This proactive, Web-based infrastructure monitoring and network monitoring solution is lightweight, highly customizable, and doesn't require high overhead agents on your production systems. With Mercury SiteScope, you gain the real-time information you need to verify infrastructure operations, stay apprised of problems, and solve bottlenecks before they become critical.
With Mercury SiteScope, you can:
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by consolidating support and maintenance tasks to a central agentless server.
• Reduce the need to track and remotely administer thousands of agents including their overhead on production systems.
• Save time and money by deploying Solution Templates - best practice-based groups of monitors for key applications.
• Eliminate the need for multiple solutions via SiteScope’s industry leading breadth of 65-plus supported monitoring targets.
• Leverage SiteScope’s flexible architecture to custom fit the solution to your company’s unique environment, now and in the future.


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Who's Using It?

COLT's Telecom Group Harnesses Web Monitoring with Mercury Application Management Solutions.