Enterprises realise the rationale behind, and the benefits gained from, performance testing application prior to implementation in production environments; performance issues occurring in the production system can cause failures, loss of reputation and perceptions within the user community that are hard to reverse.

However, few realise the benefit that may be obtained from continuing to monitor application performance from the user community's perspective once it has been deployed to the production environment.

Applications can often degrade - either sudden 'blips' or over a period of time - and the first the production support and IT departments know about this is when the users complain.

It would obviously be far more proactive if the support personnel could be alerted to trends or ‘blips’ in performance and look to analyse and rectify these prior to the users gaining an adverse perception.

Our Sentinel subscription service allows our client to run real business transactions against their production environment at regular intervals (typically every so many minutes) from anywhere in the World.

The response time of each step within each business transaction execution is stored within the Sentinel database. Response trends can be viewed through the Sentinel user interface which provides a powerful customisation engine allowing the user to view and understand the data in whatever format they require.

Sentinel is ideal for internal and hosted solutions with demanding performance service level agreements and companies interested in the performance trends of their systems.

In addition, as the results of Sentinel are based on actual test data, they may be used to demonstrate adherence to service level agreements where this is a necessity.