Kranthi Paidi of PerfAcademy joined us to discuss some of the in and outs of monitoring JMeter tests. PrefAcademy was founded with the mission to provide quality education and training services for software performance testers and engineers, and we'll get to hear all about JMeter monitoring from the teachers themselves. In this webinar they cover: - Real-time monitoring your Apache JMeter results -- current limitations of backend listeners -- modified JAR from TAG - The need for more extensive monitoring - Common problems with JMeter monitoring - Using tools like Telegraph, Grafana, Influx to achieve a tier level of scalable monitoring - Live Demo - Background of PerfAcademy - Brief Q&A https://perfacademy.com

1. Taking your Jmeter test monitoring
to the next level
Richard Friedman, Redline13
Founder
@redlinethirteen
@richardfriedman
rich@redline13.com
Kranthi Paidi, PerfAcademy
Founder and Mentor
@theperfacademy
@kkpaidi
kranthi.paidi@perfacademy.com

2. Agenda
o About PerfAcademy
o Real time monitoring of results in Jmeter – A problem that was
o Still a problem!
o Jmeter + Telegraph + Influx + Grafana – A match possibly made in heaven
o Demo
o Q&A

3. About PerfAcademy
o Established in 2015
o Took almost an year of planning and interviews to design a comprehensive course
o A mentor driven online learning platform
o Completely focused on Performance Testing and Engineering discipline
o Live classes and cloud hosted labs
o Training from grass-roots level
o Open-ended problems a daily part of the course
o We strive to make our learners career ready
o No 5 day courses  

4. Real time monitoring of results in Jmeter
o Backend listener introduced in 2.13
o Provides graphite backend listener
o Default metrics are not enough
o Test plans with complex scenarios suffered
o Multiple Transactions
o Throughput Suffered
o Cloud based executions warrant more detailed statistics
o A modified JAR File from TAG - http://www.testautomationguru.com/download/640/
o Much more detailed
o No Listener needed
o Light weight

5. Still a Problem
o App / Web / DB Server health?
o PerfMon listener
o NO
o More listeners – More Degradation on Jmeter engine
o Why? Asynchronous Threads  Snowball effect
o Jmeter Master and Slaves health?
o JVM Performance of Jmeter instances?
o Can we have Jmeter do what it needs to do and do only that?
o AND still have more statistical information without shelling 1000s of $
o Can we pinpoint a potential bottleneck quickly and effectively?
o What about trending of results? In a CI-CD environment, trending is of utmost importance to spot a
regression

6. JTIG – A stack that promises a lot
oTelegraf
o Opensource
o Written in GO
o Designed for Time series
o Minimal foot print
o 50+ input and output plugins
o Influx
o Time series database
o Fast. Really fast.
o Grafana
o Open source visualization tool for time series data
o Extensible
o Number of plugins and templates
o Supports multiple data sources

7. The test lab layout
Slave 1
Influx
DB
App1 MySQL
Telegraph
Telegraph
Telegraf

8. A typical enterprise layout
Jmeter
Master
Slave
1
Slave
2
Slave
3
Influx
DB
Web
1
Web
2
App1
App2
MySQL
Telegraph
Telegraph
Telegraph
Telegraph
Telegraph
Telegraf
Telegraph
Telegraph

9. Demo

10. Things to watch out for
o Scaling Influx once you have a considerable number of agents
writing metrics is an exercise in itself
o Telegraf agents need to be restarted when you are invoking a new
java process – A possible bug
o Tag your transactions from Jmeter by passing along a user defined
property which will make you create more informative dashboards
o New in Grafana – Alerting & Thresholds mechanism. Still in beta

11. Q&A