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Load Testing Blog

  • 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.

  • in JMeter
  • 16 min read

The Complete Guide of JMeter Controllers

In this blog post we are going to look at several JMeter Controllers, specifically:

This is not an exhaustive list of controllers that JMeter offers but these once will give you a clear insight into how controllers are integral in defining load testing scenarios and how without them you will struggle to build complex and indicative load tests.

Technically JMeter has two types of controllers and these are categorised as Samplers and Logical Controllers, the controllers we are looking at in this post are the Logical Controllers that allows you to customise how JMeter delivers requests to meet your load profiles.

Let’s look at the logical controllers with some examples of how they can be used, our tests will consist of Dummy Samplers as this is the simplest way to demonstrate how the various Controllers work. You can follow along each example by downloading the JMX here.

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