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Orbitz Open Sources Monitoring Tools ERMA and Graphite

I saw this recent article about some new tools from Orbitz: InfoQ: Orbitz Open Sources Monitoring Tools ERMA and Graphite

Graphite looks particularly interesting as it has features overcoming some of the things I don’t like about RRDtool:

Graphite is a Python web application that has been developed to provide scalable storage and visualization for numeric time-series data. It receives the output from the CEP engine, which consists of data aggregated for over 70,000 metrics. A Graphite portlet was developed in order to integrate with a monitoring portal, which is based on JBoss Portal framework. The portal presents tabular and graphical views of vital system statistics and RSS feeds for alarms. Users can subscribe to feeds for particular alarm severities and/or affected applications. The Graphite web application itself is used to display visual graphs of monitoring statistics generated using RESTful URLs. Graphite data can be presented as line graphs, pie charts or raw CSV data. Graphite also provides a web-based command line interface, which power users can use to very quickly and easily create and share dashboards containing collections of related graphs.

I’ll hopefully find some time to try this out

Posted in Monitoring, tools | No Comments »

Extract Transaction Data From LoadRunner Analysis

I had a need to extract transaction response time data from a bunch of LoadRunner Analysis files, and I really didn’t want to do endless cut and paste operations from within the LoadRunner Analysis tool. I created this Python script to extract transaction response time data from the LoadRunner Analysis mdb file and output into CSV format, which can then be imported into MySQL, Excel, etc. The analysis file is a MS Access JET Database which allows the use of Python’s win32com module to access the data.

# lr_extract.py
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# Extracts Transaction response time data from the MS Jet database file (.mdb)
# created by LoadRunner Analysis tool
#
# Requires DAO 3.6 library.
# --------------------------------------------------------------------
# Usage: python lr_extract.py lr_analysis.mdb
import sys
import string
import pythoncom
import win32com.client

const = win32com.client.constants

daoEngine = win32com.client.Dispatch('DAO.DBEngine.36')
db = daoEngine.OpenDatabase(sys.argv[1])

query = """
select
    [Result].[Start Time]+[Event_meter].[End Time] as t_stamp,
    [Event_map].[Event Name] as txn_name,
    [Event_meter].[Value] as resp_time,
    [Result].[Result Name] as result_name
from
    Result,
    Event_map,
    Event_meter
where
    [Event_map].[Event Type] = 'Transaction' and
    [Event_meter].[Event ID] = [Event_map].[Event ID]
order by [Result].[Start Time]+[Event_meter].[End Time]
"""
rs = db.OpenRecordset(query)

print("timestamp,transaction,response time,result name")
while not rs.EOF:
    print("%s,%s,%s,%s" % (rs.Fields[0],rs.Fields[1],rs.Fields[2],rs.Fields[3]) )
    rs.MoveNext()

Posted in Python, Tips & Tricks, loadrunner | 1 Comment »

Introduction to The Grinder

The Grinder is:

The Grinder is a Java^TM load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines.

Until recently, I had been reluctant to investigate The Grinder because I was unfamiliar with Jython/Python, and hesitant to dig into a new language. I was wrong.

Not only am I happy to have discovered that Python and Jython are not too difficult to pick up, but The Grinder is quite a flexible tool that has a lot of potential and I would say a nearly capable replacement for LoadRunner from a load generation perspective.

In this article I’ll review how to setup The Grinder and use Eclipse to edit your scripts. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Test Tools | 1 Comment »

Customize size of images in LoadRunner HTML reports

Quick tip: With prevalence of larger monitors these days, it is nice to have charts and graphs that take advantage of the extra space. If you want to customize the size of the charts in the LoadRunner HTML reports, change these settings in C:\Program Files\Mercury\LoadRunner\bin\dat\GeneralSettings.txt:

[HTML report]
ChartWidth=1024
ChartHeight=576

Posted in Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

New look

If you’ve been to this site before, you may have noticed the new look. For various reasons, I’ve converted the site from drupal to Wordpress. Everything seems to be working, and hopefully most of the old links will redirect to their new locations.

One thing that is no longer here are the forums. They weren’t too active, but if you have a question feel free to add a comment here or find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/perfeng

Thanks for visiting, come back often!

Posted in General | 2 Comments »