We stumble along blindly in the darkness, hoping we'll hit on a magic combination that will instantly speed up our Web applications. Well, Halloween is over, and the curse of the Response Time Mummy may be, too. We tested a trio of Web application performance-management tools and discovered that help is available. These tools empower developers and network administrators by giving them a more thorough understanding of how applications are performing and why response times are lagging, thereby allowing them to seek out potential issues and correct problems more quickly. Using a single performance-management tool, administrators and developers share a common view of application and network performance, and are thereby able to determine quickly which piece of the system is causing trouble.
Software designed to explore Web-based application performance exists in numerous incarnations.
Many of these solutions are service-based implementations intended to alert designated staff about availability issues or in the event of performance degradation. While such services may be useful in calling attention to problems, they do not generally help staff determine where or why a problem arose. Drilling down into a slow or unresponsive site requires a tool designed for that purpose. Thus, a product usable by both groups can aid in problem discovery. Keeping this in mind, we considered usability to be one of the primary criteria in ranking the three products we examined.