Author Archives: Chris.Spencer

Using CloudWatch to monitor EC2 instances

By Chris.Spencer | Published: February 3, 2011
In my previous post I explained how I personally got around issues with regards to joining machines to an EC2 cloud network. This post is more about explaining exactly what I was doing on this system and how I used  Amazon’s CloudWatch service to monitor the performance of my Application Under Test (AUT). I work [...]
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Setting up Windows Networking on EC2

By Chris.Spencer | Published: January 12, 2011
This follows on from my previous blog post that covered the basics of getting started with Amazon’s cloud computing service EC2. On this post I want to go into a lot more detail about the issues I had automating Windows networking on EC2. I have very little knowledge about networking but I quickly realised that [...]
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Scalability Testing in the Cloud using Amazon EC2

By Chris.Spencer | Published: January 5, 2011
One of the biggest challenges during the development of SQL Monitor v2.0 was to effectively test its ability to scale with a large number of monitored servers. On the surface this would appear easy as a large number of Red Gate employees have machines that run one or more instances of SQL Server.  We actually [...]
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How would you generate realistic SQL Server activity?

By Chris.Spencer | Published: November 23, 2009
As a tester working on the ground-breaking new version of SQL Response I’m haunted by the following question: “How do you performance test a product like SQL Response?” Yes, I am literally haunted by voices in my head asking me this question. After all, this is a product that needs to exist on a customer’s [...]
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