Synthetic Monitoring
Apica experienced a substantial growth period in 2015. As the online industry moved toward a wider embrace of cloud services and server-hosted applications, Apica improved the company’s already impressive toolset to equip clients with technology that addresses both increasing data demands and evolution in the consumption of online content.
It’s essential for the modern online business to understand the capacity of their cloud applications, mobile apps, websites, and APIs in large-scale implementations, not only to anticipate growth potential over time, but also to provide customers with an excellent user experience. And that’s exactly what we’ve helped clients across the planet to do, time and time again.
Testing Milestones in 2015
Apica was able to repeat its 50 percent revenue growth rate in 2013-2014 again from 2014 to 2015. However, this continued growth is only the beginning of the story. As of 2015, Apica’s monitoring tools spanned a network of 81 countries across a total of 280 monitoring locations worldwide. Additionally, the load testing network grew to more than 50 load test centers that pushed a staggering 350 Gb/s of data simultaneously. Testing changes in 2015 were about conducting more sophisticated tests that pushed capacity boundaries and utilized more complex testing methods. The system ran over 1.66 billion check runs across the year, (roughly 257,000 an hour). The load test centers ran a total of 53,273 load tests in 2015, which included simulating 48.5 million virtual users and utilizing 160 TB of load test data. The biggest test of the year came from HBO Nordic, where the system pushed 40,000 hits a second for a total of one million virtual users.
Major Events and Trends in 2015
Apica’s most notable milestone in 2015 was a year-long event in improving testing capacity. At the start of the year, Apica’s network could push out a maximum of 50 Gb/s. This number grew to ten times the capacity throughout the year, ending at 500 GB/s. The online industry as a whole saw a major shift in focus from a desktop/laptop-based Internet to one that considers the mobile web the primary platform. Mobile web viewers now outnumber desktop web viewers, and Forbes magazine called 2015 “The Year of the Mobile Web.” Apica performed more and more mobile load testing throughout 2015 as a result.
The Internet also went through a shift in 2015 where peak traffic levels hit higher than ever, a trend that originates in the mobile and desktop web becoming synonymous. Servers are coping with higher demands than ever during major events like the NFL Super Bowl, Game of Thrones episode premieres, and Black Friday sales. News sites also experience strenuous levels of visitor influxes when a major story breaks. Additionally, the proliferation of streaming media means that websites and apps aren’t just pushing information to more users at once, but also pushing even more data to each of those users. Apica has been doing more streaming-related tests to measure infrastructure performance like the previously mentioned record-breaking HBO Nordic test.
A Year of Substantial Growth
While 2015 was a year of substantial growth, 2016 does not appear to be slowing down. Apica is anticipating changes in web programming techniques using more advanced protocols that will require even more demanding testing tools and team contributions. Apica will be fine-tuning and improving its tools to remain at the forefront of monitoring and load testing technologies as the Internet, and the ways we use it, evolve over time.