When running performance tests, there are two types of "counters" that provide statistics on your website or application performance.

In performance testing counters "count" the number of times specific activities occur ranging from successful page loads to errors generated. These counters provide the high-level results of a test, while individual scenarios and recordings provide the actual reasons on why they are occurring.

There are two types of counters:

1. Client-Side Counters: Performance counters on the computer that a load test is executing, and that simulates the end user experience;
2. Server-Side Counters: Performance counters that run on servers that deliver content end users.

Both counters are important when understanding the overall performance of your application.

The following are some client counters that report results after performance tests.

For each transaction:

• Failure rate for individual transactions
• Average transaction response time (for each transaction)
• Minimum transaction response time
• Maximum transaction response time
• 90/95/98 percentile response time

Client side activities:

• transactions / sec
• hits / sec
• errors / sec
• average throughput

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