Novell to use dynaTrace for s/w performance

BOSTON, USA: Enterprise software leader Novell is using dynaTrace software’s continuous application performance management solution to diagnose and resolve software performance issues faster then ever before.

Using dynaTrace’s Test Center Edition, Novell’s QA organization is now able to rapidly isolate bottlenecks and arm developers with the PurePath root cause diagnostic information they need to fix problems quickly.

“We’ve always run a lean shop, but this economic environment has increased the pressure on our teams,” said Novell QA Manager Mike Demastrie.

“Now with dynaTrace’s diagnostic capabilities, we can usually isolate root-cause the first time around, package up the PurePath and send that directly to the developer so they know exactly where to find the issue,” added Demastrie.

Lucy Monahan, QA engineer, Novell said, "With dynaTrace, testers can run fewer, more productive tests during debugging; running fewer tests during debugging means they have more time to run more productive tests during performance/regression testing and capacity planning phases.”

With dynaTrace’s PurePath technology preserving individual transactions for later review, problems can be analyzed whenever the team member has time, rather than when they are discovered. “Since I can send them the PurePath of the specific transaction, they can view it immediately or later when they have time, I don’t have to interrupt them to show them what I’ve found,” said Monahan. 

dynaTrace’s ability to run under load with virtually no overhead also frees up resources for more productive uses by automating away labor-intensive tasks. “Because dynaTrace is on for the duration of a test, it eliminates the need to rerun certain tests to capture additional log and tracing information that developers put into the code,” said Monahan. “This helps to shorten test cycles and frees up resources, both in terms of testers and hardware, improving productivity.”

After issues have been diagnosed and resolved by development, Novell’s QA engineers use dynaTrace’s charting and diffing features to verify that the changes actually do what they are supposed to do. This feedback is valuable to developers for verification and strengthens their confidence in bug fixes. It also helps to ensure that bugs are killed as early as possible in the lifecycle, further reducing costs.

Case in point was a memory leak that caused JVMs to crash with an OutOfMemory condition. It turned out that the leak was in a component and came about as a result of switching to a RESTful service infrastructure.

The QA Engineer was able to capture the necessary memory information and passed it on to the developers who were able to fix the problem right away, with only one round trip needed to complete the fix. In this way, dynaTrace helps simplify memory analysis, particularly in finding memory leaks in modules outside of their own code, the release added.

“We always knew the software we shipped was high-quality,” concluded Demastrie, “but now we can prove it, line-by-line.”