Services, such as those from Gomez and Keynote Systems, send robotic transactions into a Web site and record the site's reactions to just those transactions. We then let in some live Syracuse University Internet traffic. Our RTUM products recorded all the live (real user) transactions. This approach gave us an idea how the traffic we cared about looked intermingled with other traffic. Our method emulated a situation in which one IT group is caring for one application, while a different group is watching another. We wanted to know how well the traffic could be separated. Note that the RTUM products can be set to recognize and ignore bots like Keynote and Gomez.
If you love detailed data, you'll be in heaven with these products. We anticipated problems damping down the influx of test traffic, but that turned out to be a nonissue. All the products had methods for managing massive quantities of data, and both Coradiant's TrueSight and Quest's UEM suggest limiting data collection to important sites or transactions. By setting capture filters for specified servers, pages, users and transactions, thousands of other sessions being carried over the test segment were written off as noise.
Even with our tightened page, user, transaction and server limits, we collected a lot of application data, and all of it was measured. Statistics about transaction frequency, and user and server response times, as well as data about these response times in relation to historical averages and as standard deviation and percentiles across all users' experiences (all the packets sent and received), were monitored and collected in real time by all three products tested.
We took hourly, daily, weekly and monthly views to see the performance trends and aberrations of our Web server, sites and specific transactions. We looked for measured trends or averages outside our thresholds by running through application and transaction reports. All the products let us set thresholds and could alert us to violations, but as is always the case with baselining performance, it took a week of data collection before these baselines were accurate enough to use.
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