Load test and performance monitoring across network boundaries

Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers has some excellent tools for performing load test. One of the nice features is the ability to measure performance counters on a remote server while you are performing load test and have this information correlated with the request load measurements from the load test.

This works fine (given you have the appropriate permissions) in an internal LAN network in a single domain. But if your Web Application or Web Service is placed in a DMZ environment then you will have a security issue when trying to read the performance counters on a remote DMZ server.

Facing this challenge is contacted my former colleague in TDC, Peter Eppler, whom I see as an Infrastructure guru and thought he would probably have a solution or a workaround for this. And so he had. After a few mail specifying the problem he came up with a command line statement to solve the problem by initiating an Inter-Process Communication (IPC) connection with Server Message Block (SMB).

Start a command prompt and type in the following: “net use \\[DmzServerName]\IPC$ /user:[DmzServerName]\[UserWithPermissionsToReadPerfCounterInDmz]”

When prompted for password you will enter this and now there will be a connection established and you will be able to connect to the performance counter both through perfmon and with the Load Test tool. (This should also work if you need to read a remote EventLog!)