Triggered by current expected load projections for our community portal, our Apps Team was tasked to run a stress on our production system to verify whether we can handle 10 times the load we currently experience on our existing infrastructure. In order to have the least impact in the event the site crumbled under the load, we decided to run the first test on a Sunday afternoon. Before we ran the test we gave our Operations Team a heads-up: they could expect significant load during a two-hour window with the potential to affect other applications that also run on the same environment.
During the test, with both the Ops and Application Teams watching the live performance data, we all saw end-user response time go through the roof and the underlying infrastructure running out of resources when we hit a certain load level. What was very interesting in this exercise is that both the Application and Ops teams looked at the same data but examined the results from a different angle. However, they both relied on the recently announced Compuware PureStack Technology, the first solution that – in combination with dynaTrace PurePath – exposes how IT infrastructure impacts the performance of critical business applications in heavy production environments.