Combining Application Performance Monitoring With Load Testing

By Author: Joseph Mathew
Total Articles: 11
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Load testing has its limitations, but it’s still a widely used technique for finding and eliminating performance problems in applications. It’s true that test and pre-prod can’t emulate your production environment, but what can you do? You can’t just put your untested code into production. That could be a disaster.

One option that few people have considered until today is production testing. This is less crazy than it sounds at first. Creating and maintaining a test environment with similar data and infrastructure to your production environment is very expensive. So why not simply do your load tests in prod? Many organizations have taken on this approach by rolling out new code to a few nodes and gradually moving over the rest of the environment. But some of us with smaller applications can’t do that.

Instead you should do your load testing in production during off-hours. Deploy your code to production at midnight, kick off a load test at 1am, and then do a post-mortem when it’s done. If there are problems, roll back or issue patches. It’s the simplest thing in the world – except for finding the ...
... technology that can do that.

In order to do production load testing – or as we call it, application performance testing – you’ll need two things: a load testing tool and an app server monitoring tool. Ideally these would be integrated so you can access both from a single viewer. There are some application management solutions that integrate with load test tools, but even if you don’t have one of those, it’s ok. Just make sure your tools meet a few key criteria:

-Ready for any environment. Your load testing tool has to work in production, and so does your application monitoring tool. With visibility into test/pre-prod and prod, you’ll be able to see how your code performs in every environment and gain insight into why it breaks in one place but not another.

-Ready for the cloud. You may not be in the cloud now, but who knows what a few years will bring? If your load testing tool can’t automate load tests and find optimal configurations for your cloud deployments, don’t buy it. The same goes for your APM tool, which must be able to be deployed anywhere your app may go.

-Real-time monitoring. APM can mean many things today, so be sure to check how your APM tool actually works. If it depends on scraping log files you’re not going to be happy in the hours between 2-3am when you’re trying to find out what’s wrong..

Production testing doesn’t have to be scary. If letting real users test your code scares you, you can still test in production with load testing tools. Just make sure you have the right APM solution in place to help you evaluate the results of your load testing, and to continue to monitor your application when real users sign on!