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MGA has found that many Application owners and IT staff have investigated tools and services to provide Load Testing capabilities for their organisations, only to find that solutions from leading vendors were priced out of reach of their business and that the costs involved did not justify the expenditure.

This raises the question - Is there an organisation that is able to offer the ability to generate load efficiently, while being competitively priced?

Mark Gurry & Associates (MGA) has this ability and works with organisations to identify a level of testing that is suited to the client’s circumstances and budget, while balancing expenditure with risk.

Outlined below are common problems faced by clients, solutions sought, and typical results that MGA can deliver:

Common problems clients have experienced:

• Going through the upgrade process only to suffer performance problems immediately after go live, in some cases user response times have increased three fold.
• The system worked well in the test environment; however when load was applied in production problems came to the surface, which resulted in system users not being able to access the application stopping them from performing their function.

Solution sought by clients:

• A cost effective method of testing that could be accommodated within the projects budget.
• The testing must generate adequate load to allow assessment and rectification of performance issues prior to impending release dates.

Results MGA can deliver:

• Confirm that the application can support the required service levels on the target hardware configuration.
• Confirm that the implementation or upgrade will meet your projected usage in production.
• Identify risks to service levels before implementation.
• Determine the scalability of the application.
• Extend the current investment in hardware by optimising performance on the existing configuration.
• Leave the client with the ability to perform similar tests at a later date with the methodology and tools that MGA set up.
• Generate Load efficiently with minimal setup time.
• Expose bottlenecks and rectified these weaknesses under load.

MGA EagleEye and the OpenSTA product

Mark Gurry & Associates use a combination of in-house developed ‘MGA EagleEye’ and open source tools, such as ’OpenSTA’ to build a testing capability.

Load Testing is a standard feature of the Oracle Performance Tuning Product MGA Eagle Eye (see www.mga.com.au/products/eagle.shtm for an overview of the product) combined with OpenSTA (www.opensta.org) Mark Gurry and Associates provide a complete Load and Stress Testing Capability for your business.

The functionality performs equally as well as many of the commercial products, but has the additional benefit of utilizing the MGA EagleEye Oracle Tuning methodology to complete the testing process. The functionality is simple to setup and use while providing quick, effective results.

Put very simply the process is as follows:

• Make a recording of a complete Users Web Interaction at the PACKET level then format and store to a Central database.
• Replay that recording while recording statistics to the Oracle database.
• Record and Graph the results to assess and make the required changes.

The MGA Approach

MGA works with the client in the initial stage to develop an approach that balances risk requirements with the client’s budget.

Initial Phase

• Setup tools on the database and on the front end of your application.
• Ensure that the database is configured correctly for testing.
• Generate some typical transactions that will be used during the testing process.
• Create scenarios for a Batch, Enquiry, and Update (insert) transaction.
• Report & Recommendations – produce a brief report outlining what is required for the testing phase.

Testing Phase

• Generate additional scenarios based on business requirements.
• Run these scenarios in the testing environment, this will involve simulating unique runs and then repeating tests after problems have been identified and rectified.
• Knowledge transfer to your staff so that they have the ability to perform similar tests at a later date with the methodology and tools that MGA has set up.
• Final Report - outlining the problems identified and the corrective actions taken. In addition, any related issues that we observe during the engagement will be highlighted.

For more information on MGA Load/Stress Testing Services or other MGA products & services please contact us.