Measure average web app response time from the client side during a long period of time

Question

My company has over a hundred users of a specific CRM web application, which is provided as a service by another company to us.

The users of this application are very dissatisfied with its average response time, and I need to find a way to gather metrics during a certain period of time (let's say .. a week) to prove the service provider that they are really providing a bad service.

If the application were mine, I would get the metrics from New Relic or some other equivalent monitoring service, but since it is not, I'm looking for something that could do some sort of client side monitoring.

I already checked Page Speed from Google and YSlow from Yahoo, but both are only useful when you want to test the application during a few seconds. They are not meant for the long term monitoring I need.

Would anybody know a way to get this kind of monitoring from a client side perspective?

Answer 1

Dynatrace was already mentioned in combination with Load Testing. As you said that you want to monitor your live system I want to bring Dynatrace up again. Most of the time it is used to do live system monitoring to understand what end users are actually doing. It is also available as a 30 day trial - so - no need to buy it - but - use it for your sanity check: http://bit.ly/dttrial

Answer 2

One (expensive) solution would be using LoadRunner endurance test feature. Check here for a demonstration.

Another tool is Oracle OATS.

JMeter is a free tool, though I'm not sure if it's reliable enough to run for a whole week.

These are load generator tools, so if you are testing as a single client, you should carefully chose your load amount (e.g. one user).

Last but not least, you could create your own webservice client, and create a cron job to run it on your specified time of day and log the access time.

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If what you want is to get data from their server, this is impossible ... without hacking into it. All you can do is monitor the website as a client, using some of the above tools, make a report and present that to them. But even so they could challenge your bandwidth, your test method etc.

I recommend that you negotiate with them to give you their logs and to prove that their system can support a certain amount of load. If you are a customer to them, you can file a complain or test additional offers.

Answer 3

LoadRunner is no charge for 50 users, but what you really need is not a test tool but a synthetic user monitor which runs every n number of minutes and pulls the stats. You can build it yourself using LoadRunner 12, Jmeter, or any other http sampling technology. You could also use a service like Gomez for sampling or mpulse from SOASTA for tracking every page component across all users.

Keep in mind that your developer tools will time all of the components of the request to give you some page times. As will Dynatrace for the web client.

If you have access to the web server then consider configuring the web server logs to capture the w3c time-taken field, which will track every request. Depending upon the server the level of granularity can be to the millionth of a second on each and every request.

You could also look at a service like LiteSquare which can process those web logs and provide ammunition for changes to the server to improve performance on a no-gain, no-charge model.