The value of AutoPilot® in user acceptance testing (UAT) and QA development environments

See Also:
AutoPilot on-demand for WMQ

"Hey, are they related?" – DNA Testing for Transactions

Many Nastel customers utilize AutoPilot® in user acceptance testing (UAT) and QA in order to enforce a consistent set of best practices for application, middleware and transaction diagnostics.

These firms need to:

Rapidly reproduce production problems
Detect and determine root cause for performance bottlenecks
Describe reoccurring problems as situations and specify policy to prevent them in production
Benchmark and compare the performance of new releases to prior builds

Evolving Towards a DevOps Culture:

Development/User Acceptance Testing (UAT) rarely has access to middleware monitoring. The unique self-service capabilities of this solution help foster a DevOps culture, where UAT personnel can view, replay and manipulate messages in order to better replicate production problems.

AutoPilot’s diagnostics deliver the following benefits to UAT and other development/testing environments:

Provides deep-dive visibility via transactional profiling and diagnostics to the level of Java and .NET methods, CICS transactions, middleware operations and payload contents
Enables the detection of potential performance defects before moving a release into production, thus improving release quality
Compare expected vs. actual behavior during test
Explains incorrect behavior
Uncovers hidden dependencies
Ensures that transaction flow paths adhere to the application architecture

Figure 1: AutoPilot Top Charts analysis enables immediate visibility of where performance bottlenecks are in complex, composite applications

Using AutoPilot in both test and production can:

Reduce costs
Deliver improved release quality
Enable shorter release cycles
Reduces the time users spend in recreating and reproducing problems
Problems in production can be recreated and retested in development and QA via turning on deeper transactional profiling
Policies created for automatic remediation of reoccurring problems in test can be deployed in production using a closed-loop methodology
Improves the communication and collaboration in shops adopting a DevOps approach

AutoPilot On-demand for WMQ monitoring of messages and transactions provides the following benefits to UAT and other development environments:

Helps Middleware team with their mission to monitor and administer production, UAT and development environments.
Enables UAT group to stress test application systems and detect configuration and performance issues before moving into production.
Helps development group to look, edit, create, verify and test applications with MQ messages during the development.

Figure 2: AutoPilot On-demand for WMQ provides web-based self-service access to WMQ data for developers, QA, Operations and the middleware team without installation of agents

What we do.

AutoPilot ensures the availability and performance of applications, middleware and transactions from the datacenter to the cloud. Using complex event processing and business transaction management it automatically identifies and fixes problems before they impact users and disrupt business processes.

AutoPilot enables you to resolve issues when they first show up and not wait until they blow up.