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Load Testing Blog

  • in JMeter
  • 7 min read

Push to production pipelines and JMeter

This post does not look at a particular aspect of JMeter nor does it give a detailed overview of how to use a particular tool that will compliment your performance testing with JMeter.

What it is about is the principles of push to production pipelines and performance testing and while I have stated that this post is not specifically about JMeter in my experience JMeter is one of the best performance testing tools for this type of pipeline integration.

What problem are we trying to solve

Let’s consider how the world of application and technology development is moving.

Everyone seems to be focussed on Agile delivery and shifting their testing to the left and if done correctly and if Agile principles are followed this can be very successful.

We've already discussed about shift left testing and the principles behind the execution of JMeter tests from a Jenkins pipeline on this blog.

Now this is all good and speeds up the testing and ultimately the time for the product to reach production but there is a move towards using CI/CD tools ensure that Application definitions, configurations, and environments should be declarative and version controlled.

In essence if the tools detect a change to any aspect of your application or infrastructure through version control then a pipeline is spawned to ensure that they are all in sync.

  • in JMeter
  • 10 min read

Dynatrace integration with JMeter

Dynatrace is a cloud monitoring platform and is used by many organisations to measure the performance of their production systems and to set thresholds against which performance tolerance are measured.

During testing Dynatrace can be used to monitor how the application under test responds during your performance tests as well as providing the capability to drill down into performance issues you may need to investigate.

This is not a blog post on Dynatrace and how it works as that would consume the whole post, this is a post on how you can get your performance tests writing to Dynatrace and some simple ways to monitor the output of these tests.

Once you can see the results of your tests in Dynatrace you can then investigate what use you can make of the data using the Dynatrace documentation.

  • in JMeter
  • 14 min read

Run JMeter test from GIT using Jenkins

You may have heard the term shift-left testing which is essentially moving the testing to an earlier stage in the project lifecycle, essentially the activity is moved to the left on the project timeline.

The benefits of testing earlier have always been understood but not always happened when we consider performance testing which in some cases is still left until the very end of the delivery process.

With many organisations that use an Agile Approach to development, having a shift-left approach to performance testing becomes important as otherwise this may impact on your Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery ambitions if every couple of weeks you have to wait for a performance or scalability or soak test to be run before promoting your code to production.

In this post we are going to look at how we can execute our performance tests on a regular basis in parallel with the development activity using the tools that development teams use.

We are going to look at running a simple performance test using Jenkins with tests that are version controlled in a GIT repository and whilst it is a simple example it will give you an understanding of the process for you to expand on and shows how your tests can be run using technologies used to deliver the code to testing environments and production, effectively integrating your performance testing into the development activity.

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

Qytera - Case study

Qytera software is a company dedicated to providing fast and effective quality assurance for their customers. Their area of expertise includes Test Management, Test Automation, Continuous Testing and Agile Testing. All of this centered around the latest web and mobile technologies.

Prajakta Gadilkar
Moritz Salein is a Senior test manager & test automation developer at Qytera
As part of an incoming load test campaign, he was looking for a solution to easily scale his JMeter tests.
His challenge was that he had to generate a huge amount of load from various locations in the cloud
but the customer wasn't exactly sure of how much load had to be generated.