NTT Research and Development 2012 Review of Activities

Overview

Referred to as SaaS^*1 or cloud computing, corporate ASP services are coming into wide use. Because such services provide application services via a network, whether the performance assumed in application development is attained depends on the state of the network and user terminal. To deal with that problem, we developed (1) a technique for estimating the wait time experienced by the user and (2) a technique for determining whether or not a decrease in performance was caused by the terminal. These functions enable visualization of application performance and support for when performance declines in browser-based applications, which are the main type of corporate ASP services.

Features

• Applicable to applications that provide functions via the Web browser and to browser applications that use Ajax^*2 and similar techniques.
• For terminals such as smartphones, tablet computers, etc. that run Web browsers as well as personal computers.
• The time from performing an operation until the desired screen is displayed (experienced wait time) can be monitored with fine granularity.
• Can distinguish terminal factors and network or server factors in the degradation of sense of presence.

Application scenarios

• End-to-end performance monitoring of corporate ASP services
  - Constant monitoring of corporate user application for sensed performance and detection of performance
    degradation before the customer can experience and report it, with links to pro-active improvement actions
• Use together with automated testing tools for application performance profiling
  - Combined with automated testing tools such as Apache jmeter and Road Runner, this technology can
    automatically determine whether an application achieves the target experienced wait time.

• *1 SaaS: Software as a Service is a form of service in which software is used via a network.
• *2 Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript + XML used for dynamic updating of a part of a Web page.