Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction ProactiveNet 4.1.2 Concord Communications eHealth Suite 5.0.2 Other Products Reviwed Executive Summary How We Tested Report Card

We ran a Web server with an ASP application and pointed two communities of users at it. The first group used Mercury Interactive LoadRunner 7.51, letting us control the amount of load on the server. We varied the number from a few concurrent sessions to more than 100--more than enough to bring our test ASP application to a complete standstill and peg the Web servers' memory and CPU.

The second community was much smaller--just a few machines, routed through The Cloud 2.1, a WAN simulator from Shunra Software. In this way we could control the remote clients' throughput and response times. These clients executed robotic and actual transactions, which all the products monitor.

Both sets of user communities were routed to a shared switch, upon which a span port was created. We used a multiport NetOptics tap to connect all the probes to the span port.