Coming off the holiday season, many organizations are understandably reviewing the performance of their mobile and Web applications in 2015. With that in mind, Dynatrace has released a Dynatrace Load tool that now includes the ability to test synthetic workloads before an application is deployed in production.
While Dynatrace tools have been used to monitor applications running in production, Aaron Rudger, director of product marketing for Dynatrace, says Dynatrace Load will make it possible for IT organizations to run “what-if scenarios” surrounding new applications or changes to existing one.
Rather than having to cobble together a variety of tools, Rudger says Dynatrace now makes it possible for IT organizations to access a complete portfolio of mobile and Web application tools. Rudger adds that synthetic testing is especially important these days because when it comes to mobile and Web applications, IT organizations rarely get a second chance to impress an end user. If the initial usage of a mobile application in particular is disappointing, Rudger notes that it’s unlikely that end users will ever come back to that application.
The challenge most IT organizations face today is that they often don’t know if a performance issue is related to the application itself or any one of the backend services that application depends on to deliver a particular piece of functionality. Worse yet, Rudger says that as the number of application programming interfaces (APIs) that an application invokes increases, so too does the complexity associated with figuring out what might be adversely affecting performance.
Via its Blazemeter tools, Dynatrace has been promoting the need for continuous testing across the enterprise. But as critical as that concept may be for most organizations, there’s still nothing better than preventing an application performance problem before it occurs.