Chapter 12. Executing and Monitoring Stress-Test Runs

Finally, the big event has arrived! Whether it's a full week, a couple of weeks, or maybe just a couple of days, the start of your official stress-test runs marks a significant milestone in your test plan. But to successfully pull off stress “test week,” many things must come together, just as they did in the days and weeks preceding test week. This chapter is dedicated to covering those things, in effect walking you through an actual stress test and helping you deal with the trials and tribulations that are common along the way. Thus, how I leverage my own custom execution checklist as a tool for establishing and managing predictable test runs plays a big role in this chapter, as does how I monitor individual test runs both up front and throughout each run. For the best general level of consistency and the broadest degree of relevance, I focus on executing my stress test primarily on the Wintel platform. However, because something as complex as monitoring the performance of complex business processes spanning multiple mySAP components often touches more than one platform in the real world, I highlight other tools and approaches that have proven useful to my colleagues and me in the past. Likewise, because multiple platforms usually necessitate more than one performance-monitoring utility, I reach down deep into my tool bag to leverage some of the many technology-stack-specific performance-monitoring solutions. Doing so is often the only way to gather a broad base of performance data, which will in turn be analyzed (in the next chapter) to be subsequently used in iterative performance-oriented test and tuning runs.