Web Application Testing

Q: I am a performance tester. can you suggest me a third party tool for network monitoring? Our application is web based and my client requirement is to find Latency and Bandwidth.

A: Hi …
To find real latency and bandwidth requirements of your web applications a dedicated performance measurement tool would be more helpful than a network monitor.

For network monitoring, you can use free domain or commercial packet sniffer with analysis capability. Check the utilities that use PCAP or simply tcpdump, snoop, kismet or wireshark (a.k.a. ethereal). But seeing all network data and analyzing raw data for application level latency and bandwidth problems will require a lot of additional time from you. There are also professional network monitoring tools but I will skip that part. You can monitor all traffic via taps and traffic replicators or simply use netflow, sflow, cflow data from routers. There are many tools to analyze network capture and flow data.

For your web applications what you need is a web performance test tool. A long list of test tools are listed at the URL address below:
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html

Your options are
1- Use a free domain tool from the list above
2- Use a web based performance measurement service. To use this kind of in-the-cloud services, your application must have public IP addresses (Internet Facing). Gomez, Keynote and Alertsite are a couple of examples. Network Computing had ran a test long ago: http://www.networkcomputing.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1423f4
3- You can use a professional load generator. All these appliances have a web testing feature. Web testing is not their strongest point (they are really good at generating IP traffic at all sizes –helps to measure performance) These tools are for deep pocket projects. Spirent Avalanche / Reflector, IXIA IXChariot are the first names
4- For web application testing, there are complete toolsets (big ticket items again). You can get much more than latency and server response time data. These tools come with ready to use test scripts and scripting environments. The big players are usual suspects:
a. Mercury interactive tools (Acquired by HP) : http://www.mercury.com/us/
b. BMC Performance Management: http://www.bmc.com/products/products_services_detail/0,,0_0_0_2001,00.html
c. CA Wily : http://www.wilytech.com/solutions/products/BRTAdapter.html
d. Compuware: http://www.compuware.com/products/vantage/464_ENG_HTML.htm . You can also get good network analysis tools from Compuware
e. NetIQ's AppManager: http://www.netiq.com/products/am/default.asp
f. IBM (which is a mix of rational, candle and micromuse) : http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/composite-application-mgr-rtt/
g. Quest: http://www.quest.com/performance-management/
h. Veritas (now Symantec) http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/overview.jsp?pcid=2246&pvid=1861_1