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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:

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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 11.9 - Azure on demand, new JMeter, setup/teardown threadgroups and more

Here we are for yet another new release of OctoPerf. We've actually released two minor versions since the last update post, but this time we will also release a long awaited feature, Microsoft Azure on demand load generators!

We kept it in our beta version for a while since we wanted to be absolutely sure it can be used for proper testing. We are quite satisfied with it at the moment, but note that the agent startup time is much longer on azure than on other providers, you should expect to wait a few more minutes if you are using it.

Of course we also have other new and exciting features to share, so let's dive into it.

Improvements

Azure load generators

Azure

As stated in the introduction, you can now select Azure load generators from the locations tab of your runtime profile. This opens up a lot of new locations and will help you test your applications under even more realistic conditions than before.

Of course it comes with all the usual features like retry on agent startup failed and load generator monitoring live during the test.

OctoPerf 11.7 - Pacing, monitoring, dynatrace and more

This new release of OctoPerf brings a lot of long awaited features. This is all based on your feedback, so make sure to let us know what you would like to see in OctoPerf next!

Of course we have a few plans of our own for the future, but I strongly believe that a good software can only result from a good collaboration between users and developers.

Improvements

Pacing your execution

Throughput

If you ever had to execute a load test campaign you are probably aware that it's not only a question of concurrent users, you also need to define the execution rate of each user.

JMeter provides a Constant throughput timer that is also available in OctoPerf, this way you can define a target hit rate and the timer will increase or decrease to try to maintain this rate:

Throughput

The main problem with this timer is that it is incompatible with anything that influences sub requests like the automatic resources and follow redirects option.

It's also often difficult to translate real business transactions activity to a certain number of hits/s.

OctoPerf 11.6 - Automatic SLAs and other quality of life features

JMeter 5.2.1

In december, we updated OctoPerf to use the latest JMeter version. Although, as a minor version, it doesn't bring a lot of new features, it is always better to stay up to date with the latest bugfixes. We had to implement a small change in OctoPerf because JMeter now properly enforces the cache control headers in every situation. To avoid any confusion, cache control headers have now been disabled by default in OctoPerf:

Cache control

Simply because every script using a loop or calling the same page several times could be impacted by this change otherwise. You are welcome to activate them if required anyway.