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Innovation

OctoPerf's new UI - Design changes

This article is the second in a series of overviews of our new UI. You can find the first one here.

This time we will dive into the changes we've made in the design phase. We've addressed many pain points from the old UI that we want to detail here:

This will make the design in OctoPerf even faster, so that you can focus more time on your tests and analyzing them.

Create virtual user

The first item on the list is obviously the new virtual user creation process. A lot of people were confused by the older UI and used the menus to get back to the project level when what they really wanted was to get back to the last step. Of course the fact that you are now required to click on Back / Next to move to the another step of the process requires one more interaction but it's also a lot easier to understand what's going on since it results from your actions. We think it's the right way to go since the only drawback is adding a couple of clicks on a process that is only used a few times per project.

To make things easier for beginners, the contextual documentation will display as soon as you select any option. It's also a better use of horizontal space that would otherwise be lost:

Back

OctoPerf's new UI - Overview changes

Our new UI has been available for everyone since a few weeks now. It is a major project for us that has taken several years to get to this stage. It's been a lot of effort but we're confident that it will be worth it when you see all the new possibilities.

That being said, we thought it would be helpful to ease you into it by going through some of the key features together. The goal is to talk about the major UI changes that impact most if not all the new screens. Then we'll cover the specifics of each individual steps (like design or runtime) in later blog posts.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is the navigation through OctoPerf. And we've made a lot of changes in this area.

Left-handed menu

Left hand menu

The top menu has become a left-handed menu now. We've always been trying to keep up with properly adding the new features in the menus like we did last year. But we thought it could be improved further. Typically, we noticed that new users struggled to notice what's inside the workspace menu so we decided to split it into another "Tools" submenu.

Workspace and projects remain visible at all times in order to navigate back to their level easily. It can also be collapsed in order to save horizontal space once you are familiar with the layout and icons.

OctoPerf v12.8 - Datadog, Json Path and sub samples

It's been a while since the last update post in july 2021, not that we haven't updated OctoPerf since then but the additions we've made are not easy to share in a blog. Allow me to take an example.

JMeter import

The thing that kept us the most busy over the years is finding the perfect way to import a JMeter project into our data model. We need to do this in order to:

  • Allow you to manipulate your virtual users in our interface even when they come from JMeter,
  • Execute each Threadgroup/Virtual user in a separate docker container to make our runtime resilient and scalable (this allows us to predict resource consumption better and allocate machines accordingly),
  • Offer a configurable report with filters instead of a static HTML.

But we must make sure to maintain the same behavior for all functionalities. And at the same time we must avoid negative impacts on our non-JMeter users (like added UI complexity, or regressions). That seems simple enough at first glance but it gets harder when you consider that JMeter allows you to put any configuration anywhere but with a different scope. For instance you can have header managers configured this way:

header-manager

Once imported in OctoPerf each Threadgroup will be a distinct Virtual User, and we need to consider carefully what to do with these headers, we must find a way to preserve the same behavior in OctoPerf.

OctoPerf v12.4 - Integrate with Postman, Microsoft Teams, Grafana and Dynatrace

The focus of OctoPerf 12.4 is on integrations, first in regards to creating test scripts through our new Postman import released a few weeks ago. Through postman we also open OctoPerf to swagger and open API imports.

Microsoft Teams is also on the menu in terms of alerting before/after the tests, but the main dish is the backend listeners. Through these you can have our load generators send metrics to your own database in real time during the test. And by database I also mean several APM tools, like dynatrace, datadog and others.

On top of all this we've upgraded the scheduler to be able to chain several load tests one after another, upgraded to JMeter 5.4.1 and a couple of other features detailed below.

Improvements

API testing with OctoPerf

API testing has always been possible in OctoPerf but to enable faster test design we've worked on a Postman integration.

The way it works is that you can import an existing postman collection into OctoPerf and we will create all the associated requests automatically for you:

postman

OctoPerf v12.2 - Flexible license sharing, improved VU validation, XPath and JQuery

We've been working a lot behind the scenes for this release because we wanted to address the license sharing issue. Up until today it was only possible to ask us to share the license for you and sharing could only share every license you own. We had to completely refactor the way we handle licenses to allow you to decide on your own to share all or a fraction of your subscriptions.

But that's not all, we also worked on a VU validation with multiple iterations. XPath and JQuery processors were only available when importing from JMeter but now you can create them directly in OctoPerf's UI and use them in your automatic correlation rules. And many other features that we will highlight in this post.

Improvements

Share a license

The main course is the new license sharing system. It used to be possible to share a license by asking our support team to share all your licenses with another account, but even if we always answer fast that was not convenient and even worse, you had to share all your licenses with the new account.

For these reasons, we've worked on a system that is fully flexible, allowing you to share some or all your subscriptions with another OctoPerf account:

new-share