Mercury Interactive Corp. last week announced a new performance tuning service for complex production systems and a set of best load testing practices designed to accompany new consulting services.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., vendor created the ActiveTune service to help clients optimize the performance of their complex, multitiered production systems.
The service leverages Mercury Interactives professional services experience and the knowledge gathered through its ActiveTest service to get to the source of the thorniest performance problems and provide more proactive tuning in a real-world setting, said David Gehringer, director of product marketing. “Well uncover and remove problems they may not have seen or that contributed to problems that were hard to find. And we find the needle in the haystack,” said Gehringer.
Mercury Interactive performance tuning experts believe that as much as 70 percent of a sites performance problems can be resolved through tuning.
“The need for external testing became fairly apparent as our site got more and more complex,” said Barry Weber, vice president of technical infrastructure at Barnesandnoble.com LLC, in New York.
“The only way to accurately build a valid test model is to use the site. Maintaining a test environment for large-scale, complex tests is untenable,” Weber said. “We turned to Mercury to ensure we did a valid test.”
The tests take into account all the components of the sites architecture, officials said. Testing starts with the infrastructure, looking at routers, load balancers and so on. The tests then move on to the application and end with the security system.
ActiveTune is available now, starting at $35,000 for a three-month term and unlimited engagements.
Mercury Interactive also has created a set of best-testing practices, called ARMM (Application Risk Management Model), that provides a method for evaluating the effectiveness of an enterprises existing quality assurance practices and helps guide users through the steps that can lead to improved application quality.
Deliverables in ARMM include reference materials distributed through a Web portal. The materials go over what metrics users should look for, when testing starts and so on. As a part of ARMM, Mercury Interactive offers a three-day training course to help project managers ensure that the tools are used correctly. ARMM also includes a professional services package.
The ARMM portal is free. The training class is $2,495, and consulting services are $3,000 a day. All three are available now.