It's been a while since i created it all, but the IT guy has now sent an allstaff email to request clearing up excess data.
My biggest sin is the reams of Load testing data produced by a very enthusiastic bid to prove our system was scalable.
If you're going to have to generate huge amounts of traffic directed at a database driven site, then prepared to create lots and lots of data.
...especially if the client wants proof!
Items they'll probably want recorded and stored are:
- Response times
- Throughput
- Requests per second
- Web logs proving the activity
- Performace monitor information
- SQL analysis data
- Machine /drone data
- Number of errors occurred
- performance verses user info / ramp up info.
A lot of this information will be duplicated and not entiely necessary, but if the customer wants it, it must be provided.It also adds credibility to your testing and backs up any in-house tools you are using to create the loads.
Web logs are especially storage hungry as they're main purpose is to be produced and stores as efficiently as possible. Zipping these up helps considerably and it's worth having a good zipping tool at hand as your fall back plan.
If you have time it's worth archiving the data in a more efficient storage system. For instance writing a parser to place IIS log entries in a database and to normalise the data. This will save lots of storage space and hours of zipping and unzipping. It will also leave your information retreivable and searchable when youve finished.