Appvance, Inc., the industry’s pioneer in website and application performance improvement testing, is leading the app performance and load testing market in a new, evolutionary direction with the release of Appvance PerformanceCloud 2 (APC2), the next generation of its groundbreaking, flagship testing platform. APC2 now has the broadest and deepest testing capability of any product available and is the only platform on the market today to offer true rapid beginning-to-end performance testing.

Most test tools are either cumbersome, bloated with archaic features or lack the ability to truly test at a level beneficial for today’s complex apps and websites. APC2 combines advanced features with ease of use, allowing test teams to integrate APC2 easily into the current performance improvement and load testing processes. Its advanced feature set allows for test teams to develop complex and comprehensive testing scenarios, plus repurpose functional tests to data-driven performance tests all with detailed simulated user controls previously unattainable anywhere. And test scripting with APC2 is up to 20x faster than other tools.

“This is the biggest breakthrough in performance testing in the last 20 years. No one else gives performance testers the ability to dive into the app live so you can see exactly where issues lie,” said Appvance CEO, Kevin Surace. “We are out there every day working with test teams who were frustrated with the lack of insight their other tools provided and the difficulty in developing successful scripts. Appvance was founded to deliver the best performance test and improvement platform designed to be simple, fast, secure, and rapidly scalable, and quite simply displace the old guard with technology no one else has.”

The deep and rich feature set includes unparalleled and detailed control of simulated users to provide the most realistic and comprehensive test scenarios, plus maintaining compatibility with industry standard script types such as JMeter, Selenium and Jython, which run seamlessly in APC2 and take advantage of all features. The latest release also provides incomparable support for cloud and agile development along with combining load and performance testing with the continuous integration process.

In another industry first, APC2 will arm serious testers with a real-time analytics dashboard that helps quickly isolate and eradicate bottlenecks and problems while tests are running. Through APC2’s Live Active Virtual Users real-time analytics dashboard, Appvance helps test teams isolate issues as they happen, down to the millisecond. With APC2, testers also get complete stack traces, along with outputs and errors for active virtual users, so they can easily investigate and intricately assess error log details of active transactions.

APC2 gives testers the ability to simulate millions of users at the UX level on-demand, providing real transaction times right to the eyeball (including all client-side code), and run performance tests that mimic real-world user behavior, all while providing a secure and scalable product that can run in the cloud as well as behind a customers firewall.

“The performance testing market has seen far too many over-hyped tools touting incomplete solutions that only address protocol-level issues and offer limited results that don’t provide the beginning-to-end insight that professional testers need,” said Srikar Achanta, Applications Engineering Manager at Appvance. “APC2 is the first platform to offer serious testers the comprehensive breadth of features required to drive website and app performance on a day-in, day-out basis. APC2’s beginning-to-end testing platform in the first technology to properly address the user experience level (UX), giving testers the most realistic test scenarios possible to mimic real-world user behaviors at scale and identifying client-side code issues before launch.”

“In a business where sub one second response rates matter, it’s still surprising to find that most app performance testing tools are so limited and just aren’t answering the demands of today’s serious enterprise testers,” noted Surace. “When brand trust and loyalty is on the line, you need to strive for transaction times below 500 milliseconds to stay competitive. Testers need a platform that is flexible to scale on demand, but elegant and robust enough to run complex test scripts daily in modern apps at the UX level. This is why PerformanceCloud is such a revolutionary platform.”

APC2 has added an enormous breadth of features to meet the ever-growing needs and requirements of testing teams from the largest and most demanding enterprise customers, including:

  • Advanced analytics and reporting: Helping testers identify application performance issues faster with the least amount of effort, including: honing in on a specific time period, creating report templates, viewing response times of each element, location based reports, test error logging of full page error results, and increased monitoring of database and application server performance.
  • Enhanced cloud support: Giving testers a wider array of Amazon Web Services instances for load generation, while offering new capabilities for IBM SoftLayer cloud.
  • Autonomous Agile stories: Agile stories can run autonomously each time code is checked into the continuous integration platform, offering a more comprehensive REST API library.
  • Mobile and network simulation: Testers can gauge response times over simulated 3G, 4G, LTE or Wi-Fi network bandwidths (WAN Emulation).
  • Java support: APC2 comes equipped with Appvance Java Technology (AJT), a proprietary technology that allows deeper direct testing of java-based applications including AWT, SWT, and Swing apps.
  • Additional features include: Support for up to 1,000 browsers per generator node; iteration based testing; APC2 Designer now has recordable think times; supports IP spoofing at the user level for all script types; full REST API to all features; centralized management of resources; includes action APIs.
  • Advanced control and definitions include: Ability to comment out steps, define completion criteria, cloud clusters and regions, define ramp times, set interval times and set sleep time/iteration pacing, test case offsets, and to set global think times, manage cache and cookies across all browsers during test, and to specify time-out conditions.

Designed to meet the rigorous demands of global companies and enterprises, APC2 addresses the needs of performance testers looking to pinpoint issues that could cost companies customers, revenue and brand loyalty. For serious testers of large-scale, enterprise-caliber apps and websites, APC2 allows them to create test scenarios in hours, instead of days or weeks, enabling performance issues to be located quickly with little or no coding necessary.

In an independent third-party benchmark released earlier this year, Appvance PerformanceCloud (APC) was found to create and produce results up to 20x faster than legacy market leader HP LoadRunner.