Performance Engineering Research  

TCS Innovation Labs- Performance Engineering focuses on implementing Performance Engineering in to all phases of the software delivery lifecycle: requirements, architecture, design, coding, testing, and production support.  It also builds high performance components for TCS products.

The Lab is currently working on:

• Virtual Production Environment
• Performance Monitoring and Analysis
• Capacity Planning
• Reliability analysis and Automated Provisioning

 Performance Monitoring and Analysis

Every organization strives to maximize business demand for which it needs to provide best-in-class end user experience.  To achieve high levels of availability and performance, it is imperative to measure end user response as well as business workload, and correlate it with technology usage for real time diagnostics.  It is equally important for a monitoring solution to be scalable and easily deployable.

TCS Transaction Profiling Solution (ScrutiNet) provides 24x7 non-intrusive monitoring of IT systems in production, helping identification of bottlenecks and their speedy resolution.  It provides ample details for ease of use during the development and testing cycles, thereby increasing application quality before rollout.

The solution works for any OLTP request-response application and is therefore application and platform agnostic. It provides an accurate breakup of real application and database server processing time, network time and client delay, without installing an agent on any server and without invoking any service call. It has a unique correlation capability of relating transactions across multiple tiers and automatically generating transaction classification and statistics. Offering online and offline data analysis, this solution offers great flexibility and has minimal setup requirements.  Used in conjunction with TCS WAN Emulation Product (WANem) this solution measures a production like end user experience in development and test cycles.

TCS Java Profiling Solution (Jensor)

A J2EE application in an enterprise goes through different quality checks for performance from development to post-production.  As enterprise systems are getting more and more complex, one needs both a macro as well as a micro level picture on the state of performance and availability of Java applications.

TCS Java Profiling Solution (Jensor) does light weight instrumentation on J2EE applications to isolate inherent problems in Java applications such as slow performance, crashes, lack of visibility into end-user experience. It caters to different requirements of developers, testers and production support personnel by means of troubleshooting, debugging, pattern analysis, charting, and tagging features.
Capable of monitoring its own overheads, TCS Java Profiling Solution is a highly adaptive profiler with rich pattern analysis and reporting capabilities. Its unique tagging feature enables business and technology analysis of Java application performance, leading to accountability across multiple teams. 
Jensor has been released in to open source at http://jensor.sourceforge.net/

Virtual Production Environment

TCS Wide Area Network Emulation Solution (WANem)

Most applications are developed and tested on a Local Area Network environment. However, they are almost always accessed by users over a Wide Area Network, which leads to poor end user experience and higher costs of network bandwidth.

TCS WAN Emulation Solution (WANem) works for any client server based application, emulating WAN characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, packet loss and connection breaks.  WANem ships in a CD that is deployed by booting it off a PC or laptop. This way, it integrates seamlessly in to a development and test environment without intruding in to the development and test process.  The WAN characterizer feature allows easy reproduction of production WAN links and is tightly coupled with the emulator itself.

WANem has been released in to open source at http://wanem.sourceforge.net

TCS Production Database Emulation Solution (DBProdem)

Most applications are developed and tested on a development database server with minimal number of rows required to test functionality. However, in a Production database there can be enormous number of rows, which leads to large database access times and hence poor end user experience.

TCS Database Production Emulation Solution (DBProdem) currently supports the widely used Oracle database. DBProdem masquerades as the database server for the application. Any SQL query response is intercepted and delayed by an amount as expected in a production database with large data volumes. Expected data volumes in a production database can be specified to DBProdem via a web based interface. This way, it integrates seamlessly in to a development and test environment without intruding in to the development and test process.

Capacity Planning

TCS Capacity Planning Solution (PreSIZE)

The need to estimate capacity requirements for an enterprise application very early in the development cycle cannot be overstated. Infrastructure requirements depend heavily on three factors - the type of application, the business workload and the SLAs expected to be met by the application.

It follows that any estimation of infrastructure capacity has to be derived considering all the three factors into account. Excessive spending on hardware will only result in under-utilization and not enough hardware will compromise on SLAs. The TCS capacity planning solution PreSIZE takes as input the expected workload, application nature and SLA requirements to provide a holistic view of hardware requirements. It is a Microsoft Excel based tool and uses sophisticated modeling algorithms to estimate near precise hardware requirements.