Synthetic Monitoring
I recently read this article which mentions the 2012 Olympics ticketing problems:
15 UK Web Performance Nightmares, and the damage they caused
There are lots of well publicized web performance problems from Olympic ticketing to denied access to online bank accounts. The IT industry coughs up these problems on an increasingly regular basis, shrugs, and carries on. Software suppliers release product with hundreds of KNOWN bugs and with increasingly complex architectures to support access from any device, anytime, anywhere, many systems are just not fit for purpose.
Proper Preparation Prevents Pretty Poor Performance – the 6 Ps, often ignored by so-called experts. It is more important to adopt Best Practice today than ever before in our ‘always on’ world.
Load Testing and Performance Monitoring need to be part of the quality process. It is just not worth deploying software without testing – the risk to your brand is too great. Best Practice is to test for scalability, stability and for extreme peaks of traffic. Find the bottlenecks, fix and re-test until your performance matches or exceeds your business driven goals. Monitor your performance 24×7, get alerts if your service degrades and use tools to drill down to the cause of the problem.
Test early, test often, even as part of your agile development process to isolate basic scalability problems then test big with your deployment candidate. Monitor with tools to give you insight into how a user interacts with you application – from tri-platform of desktop/laptop, tablet or smartphone.
The user is the ultimate judge of a service – not someone in marketing or development.
Ping me if you think these six P’s are worth looking into.
Regards
Mike
Mike Howse [email protected]
VP International
London, UK
office: +44 (0)1628 440826
Cell: +44 (0)7770 568524