Performance Monitoring of Web-Based IT Systems

Abstract

Web-based IT systems have become very popular among corporations being a strategic part of their business approach. However, the success of web-based IT systems is very dependent on the performance at the customer end. Today, IT departments are responsible for the performance and the availability of their web-based business applications. They often receive complaints about the performance degradation of these applications at customer sites, thus IT departments need to provide answers with evidence to their customer why they are experiencing bad performance. In order to answer their customers, they need a very quick and easy way to determine the possible causes of the performance degradation at customer sites. To do this, they must first identify in which part of the end-to-end client-server communication the problem lies. The main focus of this thesis is to address the problem of performance degradation that is experienced by web-based IT systems at customer sites, by identifying the part of the end-to-end client-server communication in which the problem might exist. In this study, we propose a model that aims to measure response time for different web servers by generating simple web requests and then to provide statistical analysis to identify whether the problem lies in Local Area Network (LAN) at the customer site, Wide Area Network (WAN) or LAN at the server site. The proposed model is based on findings from the literature review and interviews in the IT industry. We have performed a case study at Volvo IT in order to validate the usability and practicality of the proposed model. The results of the case study provide a way to quickly identify the part of the end-to-end client-server communication where the problem lies. The results of the case study also reveal the possibility of determining the LAN status at customer sites of the web-based IT systems.