Towards Performance Prediction of Large Enterprise Applications Based on Systematic Measurements

Understanding the performance characteristics of enterprise applications, such as response time, throughput, and resource utilization, is crucial for satisfying customer expectations and minimizing costs of application hosting. Enterprise applications are usually based on a large set of existing software (e.g. middleware, legacy applications, and third party services). Furthermore, they continuously evolve due to changing market requirements and short innovation cycles. Software performance engineering in its essence is not directly applicable to such scenarios. Many approaches focus on early lifecycle phases assuming that a software system is built from scratch and all its details are known. These approaches neglect influences of already existing middleware, legacy applications, and third party services. For performance prediction, detailed information about the internal structure of the systems is necessary. However, such information may not be available or accessible due to the complexity of existing software. In this paper, we propose a combined approach of model based and measurement based performance evaluation techniques to handle the complexity of large enterprise applications. We outline open research questions that have to be answered in order to put performance engineering in industrial practice. For validation, we plan to apply our approach to different real-world scenarios that involve current SAP enterprise solutions such as SAP Business ByDesign and the SAP Business Suite.