Gee, performing and presenting results over a tool such as this is one of the most kinda-embarrassing situations for me...mostly a nightmare...
But lets take it from the start...
First, Georgie (friend and colleague) and I had to go and see what this RUM 7.5 tool really is.
Once we saw the environment and we somewhat started coming to terms with the architecture of the probes and stuff, we realized that this was a big challenge for us to see if we can actually get hands upon a tool designed 4 years before we even knew that such a tool existed.
So we started digging in RUM's cemetary, we came across two environments a test and a production one, pages configured erroneously, nonexistent transactions, whatever garbage one can meet, with semi-done jobs lying like scattered bodies on a cemetery's ground, dead probes getting zero traffic to and from the application servers...YOU name it!
Anyway, we found a roadmap on ourselves and started playing around.
We were supposed to create 3 transactions and get results for both test and live environments.
And after a day and a half of knocking our heads down on the tiles testing the web test environment by logging in, performing mock payments and logging out, again logging in with a random username and giving out a non-numeric password, trying to catch this as an erroneous message and diving back into the rum environment, going back to the pages definitions, creating a transaction and defining it as a potential error, defining big-time-monkey-business thresholds...going crazy...and crazier, we finally got back results...metrics, everything we needed so that we could rely on and start implementing the same things on the production environment.
Now all this made me feel like i was some 80-year-old spinster, knitting all day long for no reason, waiting for Prince Charming to appear to give me back just a glance, pass me over the blood pressure pills my doctor prescribed, give me a kiss on the cheek - as if Good job Kiss, keep on trying kiss- and vanish.
Back to my story now lads, we actually did all this in 3 days time and on the fourth day the live env's transactions that we defined started getting metrics such as End user results, Session Analysis results, Page Summary results, transaction Summary Results, whatever is predefined in the above snapshot.
Here's a snapshot of the results we got on the production environment 7 days after the transaction was created and finally the whole system started working for us.
Now that made us sigh...and just take a look on the Runs section... 3.914 and counting...
Two weeks later the big day arrived... we were supposed to perform a DEMO-mini Presentation in the production environment, relating to the results we got...
Now that was Nightmare number 2. Having about 10 people in a meeting room, trying to persuade them that:
a) The product they bought 3-4 years ago is a useful tool for their organization.
b) Our team is capable of doing all the work in the potential project and will SURELY bring back results.
c) The vendor that sold them the specific product has a number of other products to sell them and so on...
OK, first 10 minutes were absolutely hell. It is rather unpleasant for a spokesperson to try and gain the respect as well as the sense of hearing of all the people that are gathered around.
So i gained all the respect, after sweating from top-to-toes like i was having a heart attack, a stroke and a mere cerebral diarrhea (in other words i was scared shitless) and finally, after all these symptoms, I took off!
Thank Zeus, i was told to prepare a mini scenario upon which i would drive the demo....and two and a half hours passed like river-water...i was blalblabla-ing all the time, answering questions with more blablabla-ing, showing pictures, giving every day examples of the tools' use....
Finally the whole story ended bloodlessly. What I gained? the pleasure of having convinced people from that weird Business department of the actual use of the tool.
What vendor and my boss gained? For the time being nothing as it's summer and everybody is going on holidays and will start thinking of giving us a project on perhaps mid-September...
Conclusion: I am not performing a demo again. EVER.
Many thanks to George and Nick for their help and support and most of all for believing that i wouldn't F*&%$$ it up.
