Perceiver Monitoring tool

Perceiver is the new monitoring tool.This is introduced because Companies invest in enterprise applications and infrastructure to deliver optimal service to their end-user community. IT organizations are asked to manage more systems with fewer resources, while reducing costs. Performance Analysts and Capacity Planners are often asked to create volumes of custom charts and graphs for different audiences, instead of focusing on high value capacity planning and performance engineering responsibilities that provide a greater return on investment for the company.For this it is the best solution to use the BMC perceiver tool. 

KEY BENEFITS :
User interface allows non-experts to easily access actionable data 
Ad hoc queries to track, view, and relate performance metrics to business applications 
Common interface for enterprisewide systems and applications
Out-of-the-box value with BMC best practices view

FEATURES :
1.Enhances decision-making capabilities by providing direct access to relevant performance data through a dynamic Web interface
2.Provides ad-hoc queries to track, view and relate detailed performance metrics to business applications 
3.Increases the visibility and success of the performance organization by providing a consumer viewing tool for internal customers
4. Simplifies training and use via an easy-to-use web interface, eliminating the need for expert users and additional in-depth training
5. Maximizes the investment in BMC Performance Assurance by greatly increasing the number of direct users
6. Delivers out-of-the-box value with pre-loaded BMC Software Best Practice views including an online drag and drop editor for customization
7. Protects your performance investment by providing a performance viewing tool available across multiple platforms 

ABOUT BMC SOFTWARE BMC Software delivers the solutions:
IT needs to increase business value through better management of technology and IT processes. Our industry-leading Business Service Management solutions help you reduce cost, lower risk of business disruption, and benefit from an IT infrastructure built to support business growth and flexibility. Only BMC provides best-practice IT processes, automated technology management, and award-winning BMC Atrium technologies that offer a shared view into how IT services support business priorities. Known for enterprise solutions that span mainframe, distributed systems, and enduser devices, BMC also delivers solutions that address the unique challenges of the midsized business. Founded in 1980, BMC has offices worldwide and fiscal 2008 revenues of $1.73 billion. Activate your business with the power of IT. www.bmc.com

What is Correlation and why we need correlating statements?

Correlation is used to obtain data which is required for each run of the script and which are generated by nested queries. Correlation provides the value to avoid errors arising out of duplicate values and also optimizing the code. The Reason for Correlating the statements are:

- To simplify or optimize the code.
- To generate dynamic data.
- To accommodate unique data records.

WHAT IS A REVERSE PROXY SERVER?

A proxy server is a go-between or intermediary server that forwards requests for content from multiple clients to different servers across the Internet. A reverse proxy  server is a type of proxy server that typically sits behind the firewall in a private network and directs client requests to the appropriate back-end server. A reverse proxy provides an additional level of abstraction and control to ensure the smooth flow of network traffic between clients and servers.

Reverse proxy server benefits:

1.Load balancing: A reverse proxy server can act as a “traffic cop,” sitting in front of your back-end servers and distributing client requests across a group of servers in a manner that maximizes speed and capacity utilization while ensuring no one server is overloaded, which can degrade performance. If a server goes down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining online servers.

2.Web acceleration:Reverse proxies can compress inbound and outbound data, as well as cache commonly requested content, both of which speed up the flow of traffic between clients and servers. They can also perform additional tasks such as SSL encryption to take load off of your web servers, thereby boosting their performance.

3.Security and anonymity :By intercepting requests headed for your back-end servers, a reverse proxy server protects their identities and acts as an additional defense against security attacks. It also ensures that multiple servers can be accessed from a single record locater or URL regardless of the structure of your local area network.

Perceiver Monitoring tool

Perceiver is the new monitoring tool.This is introduced because Companies invest in enterprise applications and infrastructure to deliver optimal service to their end-user community. IT organizations are asked to manage more systems with fewer resources, while reducing costs. Performance Analysts and Capacity Planners are often asked to create volumes of custom charts and graphs for different audiences, instead of focusing on high value capacity planning and performance engineering responsibilities that provide a greater return on investment for the company.For this it is the best solution to use the BMC perceiver tool. 

KEY BENEFITS :
User interface allows non-experts to easily access actionable data 
Ad hoc queries to track, view, and relate performance metrics to business applications 
Common interface for enterprisewide systems and applications
Out-of-the-box value with BMC best practices view

FEATURES :
1.Enhances decision-making capabilities by providing direct access to relevant performance data through a dynamic Web interface
2.Provides ad-hoc queries to track, view and relate detailed performance metrics to business applications 
3.Increases the visibility and success of the performance organization by providing a consumer viewing tool for internal customers
4. Simplifies training and use via an easy-to-use web interface, eliminating the need for expert users and additional in-depth training
5. Maximizes the investment in BMC Performance Assurance by greatly increasing the number of direct users
6. Delivers out-of-the-box value with pre-loaded BMC Software Best Practice views including an online drag and drop editor for customization
7. Protects your performance investment by providing a performance viewing tool available across multiple platforms 

ABOUT BMC SOFTWARE BMC Software delivers the solutions:
IT needs to increase business value through better management of technology and IT processes. Our industry-leading Business Service Management solutions help you reduce cost, lower risk of business disruption, and benefit from an IT infrastructure built to support business growth and flexibility. Only BMC provides best-practice IT processes, automated technology management, and award-winning BMC Atrium technologies that offer a shared view into how IT services support business priorities. Known for enterprise solutions that span mainframe, distributed systems, and enduser devices, BMC also delivers solutions that address the unique challenges of the midsized business. Founded in 1980, BMC has offices worldwide and fiscal 2008 revenues of $1.73 billion. Activate your business with the power of IT. www.bmc.com

LoadRunner – Script Anatomy Description

When you record and save a LoadRunner script in Vugen, there are a number of files that are created. Here’s what they are, and what they do and identification of the files you can safely delete..

Files Required for PlaybackDuring the course of recording and playback of scripts, the Vugen application will create many files, but only some of them are necessary for playback (either in Vugen or the Controller).

For example, say you have script named PerformancEngineer, with two Actions, Home and Forums, then the required files you would need in the PerformanceEngineer script directory would be:

* PerformanceEngineer.usr
* default.usp
* default.cfg
* globals.h
* Home.c
* Forums.c
* vuser_init.c
* vuser_end.c
* PerformanceEngineer.prm

Here’s what is in each file:

PerformanceEngineer.usr: Primarily, the .usr file defines which actions are used by the script. There are other properties which define which protocols are used and other settings, but most of the info
default.usp: Contains the run logic for the script
default.cfg: Contains the run-time settings (except for run-logic)
globals.h: The global headers file- visible and editable in Vugen
*.c (Action files): These are the action files containing your script code. You can edit these files in ny text editor, if you want. Sometimes it is easier than starting up Vugen
PerformanceEngineer.prm: Containes the parameter definitions
*.dat: Your data files, you can save these in the script directory or somewhere else, even a mapped network drive on a different server
Files Created During Vugen Playback

All of the files listed below can safely be deleted and not affect your ability to use the script.

result1: One or more result directories are created which contain script playback results
*.idx: The .idx files are binary “index” files created by Vugen for holding parameter values
PerformanceEngineer.ci:
combined_PerformanceEngineer.c: A list of #includes for all of your Actions
logfile.log, mdrv.log: random log files which you will probably never need to look at
mdrv_cmd.txt, options.txt: These text files contain commands and arguments for the script compiler and driver (mdrv) and are created dynamically, so you can safely delete them.
output.txt: This one is important. This file contains all of the log messages generated during script playback. The contents of this file appear in the “Output Window” section of Vugen
output.bak: A backup of the above file
pre_cci.c: Output from the C pre-processor, which contains all of the functions used in your scrip, from all of the Acitons and header files.

In summary, you can delete: *.txt, *.log, *.idx, *.bak, result*, pre_cci.c, combined_*, *.ci
Files Created During Recording

The ‘data’ directory in your script directory contains the script recording data. I usually delete this so it doesn’t get checked into my version control system, but you may want to keep it around if you use the graphical scripting mode and/or you want to compare playback vs. recording. The auto-correlation feature makes use of this data, too, but I haven’t had much sucess using that feature.

Where do you set Iteration for Vuser testing?

We set Iterations in the Run Time Settings of the VuGen. The navigation for this is Run time settings, Pacing tab, set number of iterations.

What are the changes you can make in run-time settings?

The Run Time Settings that we make are: a) Pacing - It has iteration count. b) Log - Under this we have Disable Logging Standard Log and c) Extended Think Time - In think time we have two options like Ignore think time and Replay think time. d) General - Under general tab we can set the vusers as process or as multithreading and whether each step as a transaction.