Managed mobile application monitoring performance - performance

What is the best mobile application monitoring solution you know?
With the following requirements:
Managed solution
Support for Unity3d client
Monitor CPU, memory
Ability to send custom events
Ability to send events for specific device (Ability to drill down later for this specific device)
I found new relic solution for example, but it is a bit expensive, also I'm not sure about the device drill down abilities.

Related

Detect network connection availability changes

I am writing a Go application for Mac and Windows, which will perform some action whenever there is a network change( Client move from Wi-fi 1 to Wi-fi 2 or to 3G to LAN). I am aware of a solution for Application running on mac in swift language but I am looking for a platform-agnostic solution here.
So far I have tried checking for an event on an interface but I am not sure if that is sufficient.
I expect that on a network change (moving from Wifi-1 to Wifi-2 or 3G or LAN) my Go app should be able to know to take some action.
I doubt there would be such a solution.
Every project which tries to provide some platform-agnostic solution to an inherently OS-tied problem inevitably hides the platform-specific details behind a common API.
Look at https://github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify for a good example.
So, I'd take that route and would have put up a package which would have two platform-specific "backends" which would be compiled conditionally using build tags.
To get notified about network-related events under Windows,
you should probably start here.
Unfortunately, this stuff is COM-oriented, but you could use https://github.com/go-ole/go-ole to help with that.
You might also ask a non-Go-specific question tagged winapi to ask about what would be the best way to hook into the kernel to get notified about the availability of the networks.
There is no platform agnostic solution that exists, however platforms like OSx,Linux,Windiws has ways to get network events with their platform specific limitations.
OSx: Raw socket SOCK_RAW of AF_ROUTE type can be used to detect any network events that occurs in user machine. there are various types of network event that can be detected.
This thread talk about an example on BSD for network event
Windows : Windows has its APIs given as part of iphlpapi library. APIs like NotifyAddrChange, NotifyRouteChange allows you to have almost all network events( apart from metric change etc.) this git repo has a working example NotifyAddrChange, which gives back and event whenever a interface goes down or comes up.
Linux : In Linux netlink sockets allows a user space application to receive network events using netlink sockets.

Jmeter Mobile Native App Testing

I have Two Question related to Native App Performance Testing?
1)I have a Payment App, and it comes with bank security which is installed at the time of app installation. It sends an token number and rest of the data in encrypted format. Is it possible to handle such kind of request using Jmeter or any other performance testing tool, do i need to change some setting in app server or jmeter to get this done ?
2)Mobile App uses Device ID, so if i simulated load on cloud server it will use same Device ID which i used while creating script? is it possible to simulate different mobile ID to make it real-time?
any Help or references will be appreciated ..:)
(1) Yes. This is why performance testing tools are built around general purpose programming languages, to allow you (as the tester) to leverage your foundation skills in programming to leverage the appropriate algorithms and libraries to represent the same behavior as the client
(2) This is why performance testing tools allow for parameterization of the sending datastream to the server/application under test
I'm not an expert in JMeter. But work a lot with Loadrunner (LR) (Performance Testing Tool from HP). Though JMeter and LR are different tools, they work under same principle and objective and so objective of performance testing.
As James Pulley mentioned, the performance testing tool may have the capability. But the question is,
Have your tried recording your app with JMeter? Since your app is a native kind, please do the recording from simulator/emulator and check the feasibility. JMeter might not be the right candidate for mobile app load testing.
Alternatively there are lot of other tools available (both commercial and opensource) in market for your objective.
Best Regards
With the raise of several mobile network technologies, load testing a mobile application has become a different ball game in comparison with normal web app load testing. This is because of the differences in the response times that occur in different mobile networks such as 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. Additionally the client being a mobile device has plenty of physical constraints such as limited CPU, RAM, internal storage etc. All of these need to be considered while conducting performance testing of a mobile application if one wants to simulate a scenario close to a real time condition.
Coming to your 2 questions,
1) Yes it is possible but the amount of manual effort that needs to be invested to make the script execution ready might vary (since you are mentioning there is data in encrypted format - some are easy to understand and some are just crude and difficult to handle using JMeter). But there might not be any app server setting that would be required to change (unless of course you are unable to handle the encryption with JMeter in which case, the encryption might have to be disabled for QA phase)
2) As rightly said by James Pulley, these values can be parameterized. However, I fear that these values will be validated by the app server and hence the values need to be appropriately fed in the requests.
You can refer to this link for reference on how to do Mobile Performance Testing for Native application http://www.neotys.com/documents/doc/neoload/latest/en/html/#4234.htm#o4237
.The same could be extrapolated to JMeter to an extent.

replacing socket.io with telepat for real time updates

How does telepat-io differ from socket-io and other socket based real time sytems ? what is the underlying technology - is it a wrapper on top of socket-io ?
Reading through their website, you can see references to socket.io...
Reading through their code, for example, their client code, you can also find references to socket.io...
It seems to me that the word wrapper doesn't fit, as they focus on creating an optimized design for meshing different technologies to create a real-time application backend... I would go with the word framework if I had to put a name on it. If you like their approach, you'll probably enjoy simplified scaling as this is one of their main concerns.
As Myst pointed out, Telepat is more of a framework, a full stack software. This framework uses socket.io for the notification part of the system: clients manipulate application resources -> API -> workers -> subscribed clients get notified of the changes through various means (Apple Push Notifications, Google Cloud Messaging and web sockets for any other client).
So in short: Telepat uses socket.io for client notifications.

Ways of communications between Chromium container and VB application

We have a traditional VB application which are used for Organization operations. Now we are building a Hybrid application developed by using HTML5,CSS and Javascript which is targeted on Google Chromium desktop container. Now we are planning to provide a way to exchange large data like employees records between both of these 2 applications. Now my specific question is
What are the different ways to achieve communication between Chromium desktop container and VB application to exchange large chunks of data?
Sounds a bit painful no matter what.
Chrome Apps Architecture
All external processes are isolated from the app.
This would seem to suggest the obvious course is to use cloud data services, whether on public or private clouds.
I suspect that for political as well as practical reasons no cloud vendor goes to the trouble to provide VB/VBA-friendly APIs for their services. Mainly nobody wants to deal with support issues from the teeming hordes of casual coders the VB community is saddled with.
The VB6 community hasn't stepped up and taken care of this themselves either.
If you can limp along with the burdens of ".Net Inter Clop" (the usual MS answer) that might be a way to exploit existing API implementations.
Otherwise you might roll your own cloud. I see a few obvious services you'd want to implement in your cloud with lightweight APIs easily implemented in both of your development ecosystems:
Bulk Storage. I suggest WebDAV, which IIS supports. If you eschew the locking features then WebDAV API implementations are pretty easy in both JS and VB. Or buy (or scrounge open source) implementations of a more complete WebDAV client library.
DBMS. Pick any, implement a simple REST-like XML over HTTP API. Relatively easy to implement.
Push Notifications. I'd write a custom service accepting long-duration TCP connections from all clients, and with protocols and workflow à la Amazon SNS or Google Cloud Messaging. Such a service would be generally light in resource consumption but you'd probably want a dedicated box with OS tweaks to support a large number of active TCP connections.
Maybe optionally a message queue service?
Nothing novel here, these are all well established patterns.
All of the tools to do that are pretty off-the-shelf whether you want your cloud servers to be based on Windows, Linux, or generically Java anywhere.
Most of the effort will probably go into developing a consistent authentication model, access control model, and of course an integrated administration interface, monitoring, and logging to help keep operating overhead low and uptime high. Well, that and developer docs and training.
Ok, still a lot of work. Too bad there isn't a "cloud in the box" with the API libraries you'd need that you can buy off the shelf today.
Or perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Performance monitoring all layers of a system

I use several loadtesting tools (Loadrunner, JMeter, NeoLoad) to performance test different applications. Im wondering if it is possible to monitor all layers of an application stack so for example. Say i have the following data chain.
Loadbalancer <-x-> Application Server <-x-> RMI <-x-> Java Application <-x-> MQ <-x-> Legacy application <-x-> Database
Where i have marked the x in the chain i am interested in monitoring, for example avg responsetimes.
Obviously we could simply create a wrapper on all endpoints which would gather the statistics for us and maybe we could import it into loadrunner or other loadtesting tools and sideline hem with the tools inbuilt performance statistics, but maybe there is tools/applications which already does this?
If not, how should we proceed, in order to gather this kind of statistics?
The standard for this was supposed to be Application Response Measurement (ARM). It was a cross language set of APIs that did just what you were looking for. The issue is that the products that implement this spec all tend to be big, expensive "enterprise" level monitoring tools. Think multi-week installs, consultants, more infrastructure and lots of buzzwords.
Still, if this is a mission critical app with a mission critical budget, this may be what you need. But you may be able to build your own that does just enough without too much effort. A quick search turns up at least one open source ARM implementation if you still want to use that API.
Another option is to simply to have transactions you can run against each tier of the system to check general responsiveness. For example you can have a static web page on the LB, a no-op tx on the app server, a "hello" servlet on the Java app, put a message directly on the queue, etc. During a performance / load test, these could be hit directly by the load testing tool or you could write a wrapper servlet / application call that does this as a single HTTP (RMI?) call. Running these a few times a minute won't add too much load to the system, but it should help you pinpoint which tier is slower. The nice thing about this approach is that it also works in production, just watch out for security issues.
For single user kind of test, where you know you have problem (e.g. this tx is "slow"), I have also had pretty good luck with network tracing. It's very tedious, but when you aren't sure what tier is slow, starting up a network trace on a few machines and running a single tx usually gives a good idea of what the system is doing.
I have handled this decomposition a number of ways in the past. The first is at a very low level using protocol analyzer dumped data to find the time points where a conversation leaves tier X and enters tier Y. The second method is through the use of log examination for the various tiers. Something that can make your examination quite usefule in this case is a common log server for all of your components (syslog, Rsyslog, etc....) and a nice log parsing tool, such as the freely available Microsoft Logparser. The third method utilization of the audit trail for an application stored in the database. You may find this when working on enterprise services bus style applications which have a consumer/producer model and a bus to pass information rather than a direct connection. The audit trails I have seen are typically stored in a database and allow the tracking of an individual transaction through the entire application infrastructure. Your Load balancer, as a network device, may be out of the hunt on this one.
Note, if you go the protocol analyzer or log route, then be sure and synchronize all of your source information devices to a common time server. Having one of your collectors (analyzer, app log) off on a time stamp basis can really be a hair pulling experience when you get into the analysis phase.
As to how you move from your collected data into LoadRunner, that part is very mechanical. The Analysis program supports an interface to import external datapoints. The format is very specific and is documented in both help and the online docs. This import process works very well, as I often have to use it for collection of statistics from hosts which I do not have direct monitoring access to, but which need to be included as a part of the monitored test infrastructure.
James Pulley
Moderator (YahooGroups LoadRunner, Advanced-Loadrunner; GoogleGroups lr-LoadRunner; Linkedin LoadRunner, LoadRunnerByTheHour; SQAForums LoadRunner, WinRunner)

Resources