Patent ID: 8413157

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: continuously, actively and unobtrusively varying stress on a software application running on a computer system while processing, via a processor of the computer system, real user workloads, wherein continuously and unobtrusively varying stress includes: configuring application resources for a recovery configuration whose service levels are satisfactory, wherein the application resources are associated with the software application; configuring the application resources for stress configurations to affect the service levels; transitioning the application resources from the recovery configuration to a stress configuration for a time duration, wherein the application resources of the stress configuration are transitioned back to the recovery configuration; acquiring service level and stress data for the stress configuration where the latency to acquire the data when used as the time duration of the stress configuration causes unsatisfactory service levels; determining a combination of a next stress configuration and the time duration to vary stress such that user service levels are unobtrusively affected by limiting the time duration in inverse relation to an uncertainty in predicting the service level impact of the stress configuration; and determining a stress level metric for the stress configuration, wherein the stress level metric comprises a load per a resource which is one of calculated as a total workload divided by a number of resources or calculated as the workload on a specific resource which receives a variable fraction of the total workload, and wherein the maximum stress limit is calculated as a lower of a currently defined maximum stress limit and the stress level metric determined when service levels impact a response time service impact limit.