Preparing your benchmark

Preparing a benchmark is probably the most important task you will have to do. In fact, if you miss it, it is guaranteed the benchmark will be a failure and useless. Even if tasks are not very complicated in general, they will not be done by themselves. So take your time to ensure they are done before the benchmark starts.

Defining the benchmark criteria

A benchmark is always done to make sure we encounter a metric. Therefore, the first step of benchmark preparation is to clearly define this metric.

Defining a metric means clearly defining what is measured and how to measure it.

Defining the metric

Defining what is measured means to define the bounds of the measurement. In other words, when the metric starts and when the metric ends. This can sound simple to do, but don't forget we work in a multi-layer environment and that you can miss some layers if your monitoring is not well defined.

Here are some examples, based on our quote-manager application, where not defining...