Can eValid monitoring do that?

[softqa]

We want to run tests every hour that involved 1, 10, 20, 50, 100 simultaneous users. The sessions are very quick, but we want to confirm that our server farm has the capacity for that much "ramp up" on a regular basis. Can eValid monitoring do that?

[eValid]

We want to run tests every hour that involved 1, 10, 20, 50, 100 simultaneous users. The sessions are very quick, but we want to confirm that our server farm has the capacity for that much "ramp up" on a regular basis. Can eValid monitoring do that?

Yes, it actually can. But there are some practical facts that you might want to take into account:

(1) The total playback time for the 5 scenarios you are outlining might take more than the nominal 15-minute monitoring interval -- and certainly much longer than a 5-minute interval. So you probably would want to run these kind of ramp-ups only every hour or so.

(2) The setup for this kind of monitoring is very easy, using eValid's batch/command-line interface. However, collecting data will take more care because the regular method for collecting performance data that eValid uses might introduce some problems. Instead, we generally would recommend use of the "SaveRecord" command to accumulate details during all of the test playbacks, and analyze that data off line.

(3) In practical terms you'd probably want to assign a single machine to this sequence of playbacks, due to the fact that some portion of the time will probably be close to saturating the PC with workload. eValid scales about 100:1 in a single XP image, and perhaps 200:1 in a cloud-based WS2003 server image, but once you have that many playbacks going you really can't do much more with that machine...at least while the loading test is running.

(4) Also, again being very practical, this service may be slightly more expensive than running a 100 second test every 15 minutes...but that would be a surprize, would it. Give us some parameters and we'll work out some numbers for you.

The eValid Team