NAV Service Performance Test

To fully understand how well a Microsoft Dynamics NAV server instance is performing and to proactively detect potential glitches in its operations, an administrator has to:

Closely track the calls made to and trasactions executed by the NAV service of instance;
Determine how well the service is handling these calls and transactions, and;
Accurately isolate processing bottlenecks/failures/faults before users do.

The NAV Service Performance test helps with this. This test observes the call and transaction load on every instance of the NAV service and checks whether/not that service instance is able to handle this load. In the process, pending calls, failed calls, faulted calls, and aborted transactions are brought to the attention of the administrator, thus alerting him/her to potential problems in NAV operations.

Target of the test : A Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server

Agent deploying the test : An internal/remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of results for every instance of the NAV service being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test
Parameters	Description
Test Period	This indicates how often should the test be executed.
Host	The IP address of the NAV server to be monitored.
Port	The port number at which the NAV server listens to.

Measurements made by the test
Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Calls	Indicates the number of calls to this service.	Number	This is a good indicator of the workload of the NAV service.
Calls rate	Indicates the rate at which calls are made to this service.	Calls/sec
Calls outstanding	Indicates the number of in-progress calls to this service.	Number	A consistent increase in the value of this measure indicates that the service is unable to process calls as quickly as it receives them. If the situation persists, the NAV server may choke due to overload. You may want to allocate more processing power to the server to ensure speedy servicing of calls.
Calls failed rate	Indicates the rate of calls that have unhandled exceptions, and are received by this service.	Failed/sec	A low value is desired for this measure.
Calls faulted rate	Indicates the rate at which calls have returned faults to this service.	Faulted/sec	A low value is desired for this measure.
Call duration	Indicates the average duration of calls to this service.	Secs	A steady/sporadic spike in the value of this measure is a matter of concern, as it indicates a processing bottleneck.
Instance creation rate	Indicates the total number of service instances created in a second.	Created/sec
Queued messages dropped rate	Indicates the number of messages that were dropped by the queued transport at this service per second.	Dropped/sec	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low.
Queued messages rejected rate	Indicates the number of messages that are rejected by the queued transport at this service every second.	Rejects/sec	Ideally, the value of this measure should be low.
Unauthorized security calls rate	Indicates the rate at which messages are received from a valid user and are protected properly, but the user is not authorized to do specific tasks.	Calls/sec	A low value is desired for this measure. If the frequency of these calls increases, you may want to investigate the reasons.
Authentication failures rate	Indicates the rate at which messages are rejected due to a security problem other than unauthorized calls.	Failures/sec	A low value is desired for this measure. If the frequency of failures increases, you may want to investigate the reasons.
Transactions flowed rate	Indicates the rate at which transactions flowed to operations in this service.	Trans/sec
Transactional operations aborted rate	Indicates the rate at which transactional operations were aborted in this service	Operations/sec	Ideally, the value of this measure should be very low.
Transactional operations committed rate	Indicates the rate at which transactional operations are committed in this service.	Operations/sec