This blog post is a step-by-step guide for monitoring Apache Httpd using OctoPerf. We use WordPress as a sample application.
Before monitoring an infrastructure we need:
You can skip to the monitoring chapter if you are familiar with these steps or directly to the analysis to get the results.
At the root of the OctoPerf project is the will to provide realistic load testing. We continue to take steps to improve the JMeter experience and make it accessible. But there's a limit to what pure performance testing can achieve.
To push this limit it is vital to assess what happens on the hardware during the tests.
Of course, a realistic test must reproduce the users expected behavior, but that's not all. Once your test is running you need to know what is happening to your servers if you want to fix bottlenecks. This is something that always bothered us when launching only the load from OctoPerf.
Sometimes a feature changes everything.
Over the past year, you have been numerous to try OctoPerf, to use it for your testing projects and to share about it. We want to thank you for your amazing support! Your confidence has given us the energy to grow and to develop new features.
Today, we are proud to announce you we released a major functionality for your tests: The server monitoring.
The builder software design pattern is an object creation one. It's a great building block for classes with optional fields. It provides a maintainable and readable way to instantiate immutable classes with more than 3 or 4 fields. It greatly reduces the time developers needs to understand how to instantiate the class properly.
You have surely faced one day or another a code similar to the one below.
public class Person {
private final String firstname;
private final String lastname;
private final String address;
private final String zipCode;
public Person(final String firstname, final String lastname) {
this(firstname, lastname, "");
}
public Person(final String firstname, final String lastname, final String address) {
this(firstname, lastname, address, "");
}
public Person(final String firstname, final String lastname, final String address, final String zipCode) {
this.firstname = Preconditions.nonNull(firstname);
this.lastname = Preconditions.nonNull(lastname);
this.address = Preconditions.nonNull(address);
this.zipCode = Preconditions.nonNull(zipCode);
}
}
We're proud to introduce brand new analysis metrics. Load generators monitoring has been asked frequently and we felt like it was something crucial missing in load testing reports. By providing monitoring metrics for every load generator during the load test, you can quickly get an overview of all load generators health.
Although we take care of the infrastructure, these information are important to the performance tester: he can quickly pinpoint if a slow down is due to its infrastructure or due to a load generator being overhelmed. These metrics are crucial for us to further tune the capacity of the machines being launched.
The following hardware usage metrics are available.
The following network metrics are available:
Those metrics will greatly help to understand if load generators or the tested infrastructure have reached a bottleneck.