AZUR-GMF Insures the Quality of Its Internet Sites

The first company to sell insurance on the web through the French-based Reflex Internet exchange, AZUR-GMF had to manage the content of its different sites and enable current and prospective customers to purchase insurance online. To help make technical choices about web architecture, the insurer's e-commerce division relies on load testing and performance management tools from Compuware.

After setting up its e-commerce division, the company decided to offer all its products online, including liability insurance, life insurance, investments, retirement and legal protection, as well as creating a space for exchange and for provision of customer services, advice and other information. This put a premium on a high level of performance for its web infrastructure.

Since 1999, AZUR-GMF has employed an Internet architecture based on two servers, one running in Microsoft NT and the other in WebSphere NT/MTS. In an effort to harmonize and rationalize this architecture, the company opted for a single operating system: WebSphere.

The IT systems manager decided to test this decision proactively, before deployment, to ensure that the system the company's business depended on would be robust and optimized to receive, manage and process inquiries in a rapid and transparent manner.

The choice was narrowed down to two vendors: Compuware and a major competitor. After carefully assessing the two offers, AZUR-GMF chose Compuware because of its close adherence to the specifications, its rapid response time and, above all, the integration of Compuware's testing tools with its Vantage suite of performance management tools.

"Compuware performed better in terms of response time and performance follow-up, and appeared to us to be more suitably placed to help us benefit from its experience in incremental load tests and analysis, thanks to the integration of its different offerings," commented Dominique Face, Director of Architecture, Support and Development Tools at AZUR-GMF. "Also, its offer of professional services resources guaranteed access to proven experts if difficulties arose in setting up the project."

Once the choice was made, representatives of AZUR-GMF's IT department went to work. "Two days were enough for full training in the different Compuware solutions," Face says. "The comments made by our technicians after the training sessions were encouraging. They found the learning and implementation phases very straightforward."

Finding Bottlenecks

Pre-production is the last chance to verify and validate technical choices made in the deployment phase, before users get access to the system. Thanks to in-depth automated testing, AZUR-GMF can simulate the performance of a particular application without involving real users or their equipment. Load tests are performed by creating virtual users who make various predetermined requests as many times as necessary. Increasing the number of virtual users helps establish the point at which application performance slows down or is interrupted.

Using Compuware's QACenter Performance Edition, AZUR-GMF could predict application performance under different load conditions and thus determine realistic expectations. By combining QACenter and the Vantage tools, AZUR-GMF could:

• simulate multiple users realistically and thus gain a precise idea of response times (QACenter)
• collect information concerning application availability and how performance was affected by load (ServerVantage)
• learn how different applications consumed network resources (NetworkVantage).

These tests began by simulating 100 simultaneous users, escalating to 250 and then 500. The tests quickly identified a bottleneck in the SNA communications section at only 12 simultaneous requests—far below the target of 100. The tests generated a detailed analysis of the problem which identified the factors responsible for the slowdown. A simple adjustment of SNA access to the mainframes eradicated the bottleneck and made 100 parallel requests possible.

The tests allowed AZUR-GMF to identify http setting problems that, once corrected, increased simultaneous access from 60 to over 100 users. Testing was also extended to the company's intranet, which is more and more crucial to employee productivity.

Postponing Costly Upgrades

The tests with QACenter are helping AZUR-GMF reach production objectives. They could also help save money, because load testing enables the company to validate when hardware needs to be replaced.

Currently it uses two Compaq DL 580 servers, dual-processor servers with 1GB of RAM, to host all its web sites. Once the new sites are fully in production, simulations of expected activity will determine whether the company needs to upgrade to two quadri-processor servers with 4GB of RAM, a sizeable investment.

With automated testing and performance management using Compuware tools, the IT managers at AZUR-GMF will have hard evidence of whether an upgrade is necessary and can avoid any unneeded expense. You might say that Compuware tools are their insurance policy.