While response time is a key measure in load testing, isolating the reason for any slow transactions is crucial to generating performance tuning opportunities that allow a system to meet performance targets.  Performance monitors are a fundamental to the process of isolating bottlenecks and identifying performance tuning opportunities.  Executing a load test without monitors would be a little like running through an obstacle course with a blindfold on!  However, as monitors cost money (except as some standard monitors, such as Apache and IIS) it is important to understand which monitors are essential for a given load test, and which ones would be 'nice to have'.

For a performance monitor to be most useful, it should not in itself, impact on the performance of the system under test.  The Performance Monitors available from Mercury Interactive for use with LoadRunner are passive, which means that they do not impact on the system under test.   A performance monitor also needs to be capable of delivering performance data real time, so that performance related events can be tracked while a test is underway.

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