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Innovation

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.

Extend OctoPerf results with Instana

Today we have a look at the added value you get by using a combination of load testing and APM. Our tool of choice at OctoPerf is Instana, because we share a lot of common values. To put it short we both have a huge focus on ease of use and docker oriented platforms. I think it makes this collaboration even more relevant for our users.

Anyway, as you probably know OctoPerf is oriented toward running realistic tests as easily as possible. And Instana will get you live insight about your entire platform allowing you to instantly understand the consequences of your load test. This blog post is a collaboration with folks at Instana and you can find the second part whith a detailed analysis of the test on their blog.

OctoPerf 10.4.0 - Better Insights on Errors

We've received a lot of feedback around the way we report errors during the tests. First we only stored the first 100 errors per load generator to avoid having too many. And because of this, many of you were not able to analyse issue happening after a while. This can be frustrating if you want to understand what's going on at that stage. That's the reason behind the two main features of this release:

Improvements

Area chart

It does not only work for errors but it's probably going to be the main use case. This new addition to the report items family will show the percentage/count of the various HTTP/S codes over time:

Area chart

How we tripled our conversion rate?

OctoPerf is a SaaS load testing solution.

A load test simulates a number of predefined virtual users, to validate the application for an expected load of concurrent users. Applications tested range from company intranets to e-commerce websites. This type of test makes it possible to highlight the sensitive and critical points of a technical architecture. It also allows measuring the impact on the servers, the bandwidth required on the network, etc.

Graphical Debt

A load test campaign is usually divided in three steps:

  1. Designing the behavior of the simulated virtual users on the application under test,
  2. Configuring the runtime scenario properties (number of concurrent visitors, locations, browser and network used, etc.),
  3. Analysing the test results to pinpoint potential performance bottlenecks.

When we released the first version of OctoPerf back in 2015 it had far less features than it has today. The GUI was pretty simple and displayed these three steps in a single page, making it obvious for load testers that they had to go from design to runtime to analysis.

First version of OctoPerf's GUI

OctoPerf 10 is out

It has been a few months since the last update post and as you will see we have been quite busy. Let's not waste any time and look first into the most obvious change of them all.

Some of you may have already noticed that we updated our logo last week. A simpler text logo like we had before did not feel fitting anymore. The new Octo-rocket logo will take our favorite octopus higher than never before. To make good on this promise we have also released a lot of new features!