Hyperion Myth #4: Performance Testing Is Expensive and Complex

Oracle’s Hyperion suite of business process management and business intelligence software is a powerful tool – but with great power comes great responsibility to make sure that all of the moving parts are behaving as expected.

Performance testing is particularly important for large and complex solutions such as Hyperion, but too many organizations write it off as something they can’t afford to do or simply don’t know how to do. Here’s why and how this misconception needs to change.

The Myth

The best-managed Hyperion environments, more often than not, are those that have a well-ordered, extensive suite of performance tests that run regularly. However, performance testing isn’t something that you can get right out of the box with Hyperion — you’ll typically need highly skilled and experienced people, along with the necessary resources and time.

Performance testing is a demanding endeavor partly because there are so many different types of tests and so many ways that your system could be underperforming in terms of speed, stability, and scalability. You first need to run baseline tests in order to get a sense of how your Hyperion deployment performs under normal conditions, and a point of comparison for later tests. Once you have these results in hand, there are many other tests you can run:

• Stress testing examines how the system performs when faced with a heavier load than normal. Capacity testing is a subset of stress testing that focuses on how the number of concurrent users or transactions affects the system’s performance.
• Longevity testing runs the system over an extended period of time in order to find bugs and issues that may show up only infrequently or only after the system has been running for a long time.
• Regression testing is performed after updates or changes to an application to ensure that all features are still operational and new issues are not introduced.

The Mythbuster: Datavail’s APM Software Platform

Although it’s true that Hyperion performance testing is an intimidating task all on your own, Datavail’s Application Performance Management (APM) software platform for Hyperion can help. It comes with a variety of pre-recorded scripts for Hyperion EPM so that even non-technical users can get started running Hyperion performance tests in a matter of hours instead of days.

Our ExpressLoad software tool is intended to overcome the shortcomings of other performance testing solutions such as LoadRunner and Microsoft Visual Studio. After a speedy installation, ExpressLoad can get to work recording testing sessions for later playback and generating reports that identify bottlenecks and other problem areas.

One of our clients benefited from using our software because they needed to perform regression testing on a weekly and monthly basis. Because they relied on a third-party company to run their testing suite, any changes that they requested would take two weeks to get into production. By switching to our APM platform, the client was empowered to take ownership and control of their own performance tests and get the answers they needed more quickly.

Final Thoughts

Just like the rest of Hyperion, performance testing becomes a whole lot simpler when you have Datavail’s software platform to help. Easier and faster performance testing is just one of the many benefits of investing in Datavail.

For more detail on how to debunk this and 8 other Hyperion myths, download our in-depth white paper: 9 Hyperion Myths That Are Making You Less Effective.