subject: load testing, web load test, website monitoring, web monitoring [print this page] load testing, web load test, website monitoring, web monitoring
Evolving web technologies are enhancing end user experience and increasing web application utility. Today's applications are more complex than the traditional browser based web applications posing design, measurement and management challenges. To successfully implement rich internet applications, enterprises must reassess their approach. Testing web applications plays a major role with the ever changing complex designs and architectures. There are some challenges that will need to be considered with respect to response time, monitoring web performance of a production application with alerts during an abnormal behavior, systems management process for successful implementations, etc.
The users' satisfaction with any application depends on the usage context and environment, that is, how well the application design matches the users' needs at the time, their ways of thinking, and their behavior when using the application.
With respect to response time, it depends on the combined behaviors of the client and server components of the application. This will in turn depend on the design of the application, server infrastructure and the user's Internet connection speed. There are two main reasons for performance measurement of a distributed web application. First is to find out about the user experience and secondly, to see how a system behaves at different load conditions. The second will in turn determine the end user experience.
There are two types of measurement and website monitoring tools, one is the active monitoring which measures with synthetic work load and the other is passive monitoring tool which will measure the system at the actual load generated by users. Since active measurements are synthetic, they do test the application with extra traffic and load. Active measurements are isolated from users for load testing purposes.
