Test Wizard: Running the Test
In this video, we execute the test from the beginning to the end. You will learn how to monitor test progress and key performance indicators of a website under the test. We will show how to quickly customize graph views and how to find problem areas such as violations of performance goals by any page or transaction.
virtual users, load test simulation, key performance indicators, monitoring load test
In the next video you will learn how to analyze test results and determine how many users your website can handle. Watch Analyzing Test Results: Intro to Performance Metrics Duration 3:52
Transcript
Welcome back. Once the Test wizard reaches the "Run the Test" step, click "run test". Once the test is started, a new tab displaying the "Runtime Dashboard" opens. StresStimulus creates virtual users which issue load traffic. The Runtime Dashboard provides all test instrumentation in one place. The Progress bar on the top shows what phase of the test is being executed and its progress. The Test progress panel on the bottom-left displays several real-time parameters, such as the time elapsed. The number of active virtual users; you can see the users ramp up every 3 seconds. The number of started and completed test iterations. And the number of requests sent, requests pending, and received responses. The Graph section displays four graph panels, each of which shows multiple curves. The Curve Grid below the graphs displays additional information about every curve. For example, the key performance indicators (or KPI) graph displays the following curves: active users, hit rate, response time, bandwidth, error rate, and pending requests. For each curve you can see the minimum, maximum, average, and the last values. You can select from 16 graph layouts. For example, you can select one graph to maximize it. The KPI graph shows that, as number of virtual users (the blue line) ramps up, the response times (the green line) grows as well. After the test completes, this has to be analyzed further to make sure that the website scales well. Let's go back to the four-graph layout. To see the Curve Grid for other graphs, select the appropriate tab. For example, to display page information, click on the "Pages" tab. As the number of virtual users grows, some of the pages start missing their performance goals. Page performance graphs highlight violations with a red cross. The counter of violations on the curve grid is growing as well. By default the page response time goal is set to 4 seconds, but you can configure it for every page and transaction. Later we would need to check which requests caused the slowdown to see how to address the performance issue. Other graphs display response times of every transaction and every test case. You can also configure server performance counters that will be displayed on a separate graph. Let's fast-forward to the final stage of the test. When the test completes, StresStimulus processes results. After that, the Runtime Dashboard tab will close and a new test result tab will appear. It displays the website performance analytics and report that we will review in the next video. As you can see, during the test run, you have instant access to a large array of performance metrics such as: response times of every page, transaction and the test overall, goal and threshold violations, errors, and timeouts. Thank you for watching.