An Industrial Case Study of Customizing Operational Profiles Using Log Compression

Large customers commonly request on-site capacity testing before upgrading to a new version of a mission critical telecom application. Customers fear that the new version cannot handle their current workload. These on-site engagements are costly and time consuming. These engagements prolong the upgrade cycle for products and reduce the revenue stream of rapidly growing companies. We present an industrial case study for a lightweight simple approach for customizing the operational profile for a particular deployment. The approach flags sequences of repeated events out of millions of events in execution logs. A performance engineer can identify noteworthy usage scenarios using these flagged sequences. The identified scenarios are used to customize the operational profile. Using a customized profile for performance testing alleviates customer's concerns about the performance of a new version of an application, and results in more realistic performance and reliability estimates. The simplicity of our approach ensures that customers can easily grasp the results of our analysis over other more complex analysis approaches. We demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of our approach by customizing the operational profile of an enterprise telecom application.