Tevron - Service Level Agreement - Performance Testing

• Application performance has a major impact on the overall quality and popularity, especially in cases where organizations are dependent on IT for major business activities.
• Clients have a clear expectation when it comes to quality and have become more demanding.
• Every client looks for a reliable and fast application; performance testing ensures that all applications are performing optimally and are available and speedy.
• The need for eliminating bottlenecks has become greater in this competitive business world. Performance testing ensures that bottlenecks are identified and eliminated before the application goes into the production stage.
• Breach in service level agreement conditions can be prevented through performance testing of applications.

• To analyze the root cause of problems and plan for solving them.
• To ensure that the application meets the performance criteria of clients as well as the company.
• To ensure that applications take the minimum response time possible.
• To eliminate malfunctions in the application before the production stage.
• To make certain that service level agreement conditions will be met by conforming to a certain performance criteria.
• To minimize cost through performance testing.
• To compare two applications for performance.

• Business managers can allocate resources efficiently with the help of BSM
• With a Business Service Management solution, business managers can understand the business impact of system failure
• Service Level Agreement conditions can be met successfully
• The root cause of the problem in any application can be pinpointed and a solution can be found quickly
• A Business Service Management solution can help avoid considerable loss in costs
• Businessmen can alert clients in case there is a critical outage
• IT managers can allot work according to priorities to get the problem solved quickly
• Business Service Management solutions give visibility to IT infrastructure, which can help with better management of business resources

Organizations in literally all industries today undertake application monitoring for knowing the performance of applications which are critical to their functioning. Through application monitoring tools, an IT administrator can not only know application performance, but can also check for unauthorized access or data theft, if any, within the network. IT administrators can also ensure that service level agreement terms are met by ensuring that all applications are performing impeccably. However, with today’s businesses becoming more complicated and using multiple applications across various levels, it has become tough to get visibility into all applications and network technologies within the business. Such complex applications can be monitored through a custom-made application monitoring solution which covers the entire organization. But for the monitoring to be accurate and complete, the type of application monitoring needed must be identified. The following are the types of monitoring available for various applications:

1. Monitoring for Security

Business applications now have a global connection, and hence need to be monitored for security. Application monitoring for security ensures that the application, database as well as servers are implemented with security patches. Software products generally include a security warning, which needs to be studied and implemented in order to ensure that security standards are complied with and the application is safe from hackers. Generally, application monitoring tools are equipped to ensure that applications are updated with the latest versions of softwares. Security monitoring helps administrators with IT service management and also helps them avoid ongoing security threats through newsletters and other mediums.

2. Application Monitoring for Errors

An error in any application can result in failure to submit or display the requested information. In such a case, end users are the ones who are severely impacted. Such errors can be resultant to software problems related to the application like its code or the data base or servers. Problems can also arise due to hardware-related issues of CPU processing, network or memory. In such a scenario, application monitoring for errors is undertaken, which can pinpoint the cause for the error. Custom-made application monitoring tools are available today, which take into account the architecture of the application, platform, error messages, documentation etc. Error monitoring in applications is especially important in companies involved in IT service management.

3. Performance Monitoring

Application monitoring is also undertaken to judge performance of application, so that a good end user experience can be ensured. Application performance can be judged by monitoring the code of the application, which determines that a certain number of actual user requests can be handled. Application monitoring for performance is also derived from the supporting hardware, which provides capabilities for handling user requests through memory, processing etc.
Application monitoring can determine the performance of applications by noting the time taken for access and request processing in the logs. One can judge the actual user experience by sending requests to applications for different location and then observing the real response time.

4. Health Monitoring

Application health monitoring helps IT professionals foresee any problems and solve them before they start affecting end users. Application health needs to be constantly monitored so that any issues can be solved before they become major problems. Application monitoring for health consists of comparing snapshots of system and application parameters to the standard benchmarks. Hence, IT professionals may, as part of application health monitoring, set up alerts in case response time for transactions increases more than the normal level.

5. Configuration Monitoring

IT professionals can avoid untested and undocumented configuration elements through configuration monitoring for applications. Releases of new applications and operating system changes can affect hardware as well as software configuration of any machine. In this scenario, IT professionals need to monitor each configuration change for any unauthorized change. The best application monitoring for configuration is a process within which change is implemented only on approval by authorized personnel. Through such application monitoring, the person in charge is always aware of the changes that have taken place in the configuration.