Skip to content

Innovation

An Amazing Year

2016 was an exciting year for OctoPerf! We’ve really pushed the platform to an all new level thanks to your amazing feedback. It's been over a year and a half now working towards a more accessible performance testing solution built for literally everyone. Being a new player in this market can be a real challenge, but it’s also quite rewarding when you receive so much positive attention. Since so much has transpired in 2016, we would like to take a moment to summarize all the cool features we’ve added this past year:

On-Premise agent

First, we must remember that when 2016 began, OctoPerf only executed tests from the cloud. But we had to address both types of customers that either wish to test from the cloud and those that require infrastructure monitoring along with tests results. In this quickly evolving market, it was very important for OctoPerf to be able to address both of these customer’s requirements as quickly as possible.

New cloud provider

We have been listening to all your nice feedbacks this last year and decided it was time to implement a new cloud provider in our platform. That's why we are excited to announce that OctoPerf now supports Digital Ocean.

Cloud is not AWS only

Running large tests from AWS is quite easy and their platform is very powerful but:

  • Testing an application hosted in AWS from AWS machines is not entirely realistic because of dedicated connections between datacenters,
  • The AWS regions are nice but don't give a complete worldwide coverage,
  • Even AWS can be overloaded at certain peak periods.

In these cases, it is important to be able to run load from an external location so that the tests remain realistic.

OctoPerf built-in monitoring

At the root of the OctoPerf project is the will to provide realistic load testing. We continue to take steps to improve the JMeter experience and make it accessible. But there's a limit to what pure performance testing can achieve.

To push this limit it is vital to assess what happens on the hardware during the tests.

More realism

Of course, a realistic test must reproduce the users expected behavior, but that's not all. Once your test is running you need to know what is happening to your servers if you want to fix bottlenecks. This is something that always bothered us when launching only the load from OctoPerf.

Server Monitoring

Sometimes a feature changes everything.

Over the past year, you have been numerous to try OctoPerf, to use it for your testing projects and to share about it. We want to thank you for your amazing support! Your confidence has given us the energy to grow and to develop new features.

Today, we are proud to announce you we released a major functionality for your tests: The server monitoring.

Infrastructure Monitoring

We're proud to introduce brand new analysis metrics. Load generators monitoring has been asked frequently and we felt like it was something crucial missing in load testing reports. By providing monitoring metrics for every load generator during the load test, you can quickly get an overview of all load generators health.

Although we take care of the infrastructure, these information are important to the performance tester: he can quickly pinpoint if a slow down is due to its infrastructure or due to a load generator being overhelmed. These metrics are crucial for us to further tune the capacity of the machines being launched.

The following hardware usage metrics are available.

  • CPU Usage (%): cpu usage per machine in percent,
  • Memory Usage (%): RAM usage per machine in percent.

The following network metrics are available:

  • Network received (Bytes): incoming network traffic,
  • Network sent (Bytes): outgoing network traffic,
  • TCP Connections Established: number of active TCP connections, typically grows with number of active users,
  • TCP Segment Retransmits: TCP segments being retransmitted due to network issues.

Those metrics will greatly help to understand if load generators or the tested infrastructure have reached a bottleneck.