Tips To Record A Script In OpenSTA Using Mozilla Firefox

In global everyone thinks that OpenSTA is compatible with only Internet Explorer & Netscape Navigator browsers to record a script. Through this article you will come to know how to record a script in OpenSTA using Mozilla Firefox.

In my project we had a scenario which was not compatible with IE browser but we were supposed to automate that script. After doing some R&D, finally we got a solution which I’m sharing through this post. Please find below the details to overcome this issue.

OpenSTA records only the “HTTP requests/responses”. Any browser is only a “HTTP communication vehicle”, so we can use any browser which supports “HTTP 1.0/1.1” to record a script.

Configuration details to be followed in OpenSTA

1. Open the Script Modeler in OpenSTA tool.
2. In Option → Browsers → Select any Default Browser.
3. Option → Gateway (Please keep the below mentioned setting in the Gateway)

• In Capture: Remote
• Administration Port: 3000
• Port: 81
• In Proxy:-
  • Address: proxy IP
  • Port: proxy Port
  • Secure: Machine IP; Port: 81

Configuration details to be followed in Mozilla Browser

• After changing the above configuration details in OpenSTA, there are few more changes to be done in the “proxy details” of Mozilla browser also. Please find the below given details.
  • Open the Mozilla Browser.
  • Tools à Option à Advanced à Network à Settings.
  • Select the “Manual Proxy Configuration” radio button.
  • In HTTP Proxy: Machine IP ; Port: 81

After changing all the above configuration details we can start to record the script in Mozilla Firefox using OpenSTA.

But after recording the script there is no possiblity to view the URL detail screens in the HTML view. You will receive an error message “The webpage is unavailable because you are offline”. To overcome this issue please set the below configuration in Mozilla Browser.

• Open the Mozilla Browser
• In the URL tab type “About : Config”
• In the displaying page filter by the Keyword “Network”.
• Right click the “network.http.accept-encoding” and click Modify.
• Remove the “gzip,deflate” field and click Ok.

By following all the above mentioned steps you can overcome this issue and record a script in Mozilla Firefox using OpenSTA.

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Ensuring The Scalability Of Complex Applications Using Rational Performance Test Tool In Performance Test Automation

In this IT market, we have “N” no of tools w.r.t Commercial tools (Loadrunner, Rational Performance Tester…) and Open Source tools (Grinder, OpenSTA…) to measure the performance and scalability of the Web based and desktop based applications. Also it is an open area for performance Test Engineer/Test Consultant to choose an appropriate performance testing tool to measure the performance and scalability of the application to detect and resolve bottlenecks in the application while considering Web Servers, Application Servers and Database Servers.

 In this paper, I have focused on primary objective of using commercial tool – Rational Performance Tester (RPT) for end to end activity on performance testing for Web based and desktop based applications.

Introduction:
IBM Rational Performance Tester (RPT) software is a performance test creation, execution and analysis tool for teams validate the scalability and reliability of their Web and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – based applications before deployment.

• RPT is a load and performance testing solution for concerned about the scalability of Web-based applications.

• Combining ease of use with deep analysis capabilities, RPT simplifies test creation, load generation, and data collection to help ensure that applications can scale to thousands of concurrent users.

• It combines a simple-to-use test recorder with advanced scheduling, real-time reporting, automated data variation and a highly scalable execution engine to help ensure that applications are prepared to handle large user loads.

Key Highlights on RPT tool:

• Creates code free tests quickly without programming knowledge

• Executes multiuser performance testing for Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and mainframe environments with an available

• Windows and Linux software based user interface

• Supports load testing against a broad range of applications such as HTTP, SAP, Siebel, Entrust, Citrix and SOA/Web Services and Supports Windows, Linux and z/OS as distributed controller agents

• Rendered HTML view of Web pages visited during test recording

• Java code insertion for flexible test customization

• Reports in real time to enable immediate recognition of performance problems and renders an HTML browser-like view of Web pages in the test

• Enables Windows, Linux and mainframe technology – based test execution

• Provides a rich, tree-based test editor that delivers both high level and detailed views of tests

• Collection and visualization of server resource data

• Automates identification and management of dynamic server responses

• Automates test data variation – Data substitution with data pools

• High extensibility with Java coding: custom coding should be supported in a well known standard language that is platform independent and widely available. Java makes an ideal choice for any tool’s extensibility language

• Built-in Verification Points (VPs)

• Collects and integrates server resource data with real-time application performance data

• A low memory and processor footprint that enables large, multi-user tests with limited hardware resources

• Accurately emulates large population user transactions with minimal hardware

• Runs large scale performance tests to validate application scalability

• Provides no code testing, point and click wizards, report readability, usability and customization

• Delivers both high-level and detailed views of tests with a rich, tree-based text editor

• Enables large, multi-user tests with minimal hardware resources

• Windows and Linux-based user interface  and test execution agents

• Graphical test editing and workload modeling

• Offers flexible modeling and emulation of diverse user populations

• Real-time monitoring and reporting

• Report customization and export capability

• Programming extensibility with Java custom code

• Real-time reporting for immediate performance problem identification with the presence and cause of application performance bottlenecks

• Diagnoses the root cause of performance bottlenecks by quickly identifying slow performing lines of code and integrates with Tivoli composite application management solutions to identify the source of production performance problems

• Leverage existing assets for load and performance testing

Advantage of RPT:

High productivity with no programming: Basic skills required to use a performance testing tool should only include knowledge of how to schedule and scale the user scenarios and where to put in the data variation for the application being tested.

Rapid adoption: Rational Performance Tester contains features explicitly designed to enable you to quickly build, execute and analyze the impact of load on your application environment.

Robust analysis and reporting: Individual page or screen response times can be decomposed into response times for individual page elements (for example, JPGs, Java Server Pages, Active Server Pages), which helps testers identify the elements responsible for poor page or screen response time.

• And the ability to insert custom Java™ code that can be executed at any point during test execution supplements automated data correlation and data generation capabilities. This capability permits advanced data manipulation and diagnostic techniques.

• During test execution, system resource information such as CPU and memory utilization statistics can be collected from remote servers and correlated with response time and throughput data.

• Collected resource data is crucial for diagnosing which remote system—router, Web server, application server, database server, etc.—is responsible for detected delays, as well as for pinpointing the component (for example, CPU, RAM, disk) that is causing the bottleneck.

Lowered cost of performance testing: RPT generates a low processor and memory footprint when emulating multiple users. As a result, high levels of scalability can be achieved even if the team does not have access to excessive computing power. In addition, test execution and system information retrieval can occur on Microsoft Windows, UNIX and Linux software based machines, optimizing a team’s usage of existing hardware resources. It provides automation support for essentially all aspects of software development.

Customized reporting with all classes of data: the number of data points has moved from 100,000 to 100 million individual measurements, a design imperative is to reduce the data in real time during the test in a distributed fashion. This principle is coupled with the increased complexity of the tested system architectures yield a need to have complete flexibility in reporting and correlating a variety of data sources.

In this paper, have discussed about need for using Rational Performance Test tool (RPT) in performance testing with sufficient key important advantage of this tool in addition to lot of factors like High productivity with no programming, Rapid adoption, Robust analysis and reporting, Lowered cost of performance testing and Customized reporting with all classes of data while using this tool. Once again it is an open area for performance Test Engineer/Test Consultant to choose an appropriate performance testing tool to measure the performance and scalability of the application to detect and resolve bottlenecks in the application while considering Web Servers, Application Servers and Database Servers.

Thanks For Reading This Blog. Visit Rational Performance Test To Know More.

Application Performance Testing In Production Environment

Performance testing in production is not practiced widely owing to many risks involved, which include taking the entire production environment offline thus affecting availability, taking part of the production environment offline thus affecting performance, and the risk of updating production data during the test.

However, for applications running on large infrastructure for which there are no production equivalent test environments (e.g. Superdome servers / farm of servers etc), it is not uncommon to reuse the system resources of Production and point it to a test database sitting on a disk sub-system which is equivalent to Production.  This typically happens in a period of low load (weekends, holiday season etc) when the actual Production application can be temporarily migrated to some other smaller hardware such as a Passive environment or a DR site.

Generally, production database is almost never used in a test, due to the risk of having test data getting mixed with real data. In rare cases where a production database is leveraged for a test, it is used purely for read-only or view transactions.

One practice to be somewhat prevalent for Application going live for the first time is to use the production environment for performance testing as part of the UAT. The other relative practices are to make pilot test with real users.  Here, the production release is opened to users in stages; in the first stage a limited number of users are asked to use the system for a defined period of time before opening up the application to the entire user community. Occasionally such an approach may also be used to observe the impact on system performance by imposing a fraction of the full expected load (say by using users of one full department).  Such an option is chosen in cases where the performance test scenario in the test environment may not have been able to fully capture real user behavior or where we may also wish to benchmark the performance test results.

To summarize the following precautions/Best practices has to be adopted for Application performance testing in production environment

• The test has to be scheduled in non-working hours when the live production traffic is expected to be nearly zero.

• Part of the production environment (say one application server node from a large cluster of application servers) may be isolated for the purpose of using it in a performance test with read-only usage of the production database.

• Approvals from all relevant stakeholders and directors need to be taken prior to the test.

• A conference call has to be arranged for the duration of the test, in which all the stakeholders would participate.  All project teams would monitor their systems during the test, and if any system issues are found to occur, the test has to be stopped immediately.

To Conclude - As the industry is striving towards steady state Performance testing which demands for higher test accuracy which in turn is largely dependent on the Environment setup and Network traffic simulation. Extrapolating the test results/metrics to Production environment is also not convincing to make decisions.

In that case -It is not a bad idea to leverage Production environment for Performance Validation which ensures high accurate performance testing to fix actual performance bottlenecks at an earlier stage that might encounter during the go-Live day.

I would agree – it is not that easy to accomplish production performance Testing but still it all depends on how cautiously we plan and how wisely we execute the Test in production that would eliminate risks associated with it.

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Loadrunner Simulation With Safari

How to Simulate the Load from Safari Browser
There was an interesting requirement where we had to simulate Safari browser at the time of  load execution.This article provides information on how to achieve this.

Client Requirement:-

• Recently we were involved in a PoC to check the feasibility of SalesForce.com with LoadRunner.

• There was one interesting requirement that the customer wanted to simulate the load from Safari browser.

• The reason behind this is that the SalesForce.com will be primarily accessed by Sales team who will be mostly traveling using iPad with Safari browser.

Challenge:-

• By default, LoadRunner supports only I.E, Mozilla & Netscape browsers.

• And it does not support safari to emulate the load.

Analysis and Solution:-

• This can be achieved through Custom settings in loadrunner.

• For this all we need is safari – User Agent String that suits our requirement.

The following is an example of Safari – user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; nl-nl) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5

*Please note for recording you can use any browser and simulate the user load with any required browser using User Agent String as above.

Please Visit LoadRunner Simulation To Know More . 

Cloud Computing – Technical Evolution

There is a growing belief that over the next five years, Cloud Computing will become a major stimulus for change in how corporations view and use information technology.

Cost, efficiency, scalability and availability are the main drivers in the discussion regarding cloud computing. Security and privacy are the main issues, which needs to be dealt with when using services in the cloud.

“Trestle group consulting” made a Group research publication which talks about the Technical Evolution that’s under Cloud Test. The below articles says all about it.

Cloud computing?

Over the last decade, sourcing has become one of the most commonly used methods for a business to acquire services. The expression Cloud Computing is widely used in IT and business circles. Many users, however, are confused as to what the underlying service actually is and how it can be integrated into their IT and business process landscape.

The organizations see Cloud Computing as a model that enables access to a configurable computing resource, which is easily accessible with no or only minimal Service Provider input. It is a “Flexible and on a need-based IT service”.

One of the many advantages for the user is the fact that instead of high upfront Fixed cost investments, most if not all, costs are variable and can be spread over the duration of the usage. Cloud Computing can be seen as the next level of sourcing.

In the following section, we summarize the different types of Cloud Computing options depending on services delivered.

Cloud Computing Layers

Cloud computing itself can be separated into three service models, also defined as service layers.

Layer 1: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), offering virtual IT infrastructure (i.e., hardware, storage)

Layer 2: Platform as a Service (PaaS): offering virtual application infrastructure services (i.e.. database and middleware)

Layer 3: Software as a Service (SaaS): offering virtual application services (i.e.. applications and processes)

As in other service offerings, Cloud Services cover those specifics supplied by the service provider for a user or a specific set of users. The diagram below shows how users access the Cloud.

Cloud Services and Participants

Trestle Group Recommendations

Based upon the experience gained during reviews at customer locations, Trestle Group recommends the following points to be considered when evaluating Cloud as an IT- and/or Business-driven solution.

Before engaging in Cloud Computing, initiate a project that reviews existing processes and products. The review process should go through the following steps in order to optimize use of Cloud Services:

• Evaluate the actual level of process automation within the business being serviced.
  
  
• Identify the opportunities (from an IT and process perspective) within the existing operating model to virtualizes services.

• Analyze level of automation of processes and identification of potential by using the Cloud for virtualized processes.

• Introduce those selected services into the Cloud and define how to integrate the Cloud services into the existing IT/Process Environment.

Within Cloud Computing, a variety of technically innovative solutions are combined and can deliver the potential for an innovative business approach leading to cost reduction, cost structure improvement, variability of cost, flexibility of services and ultimately entire new business models.

Security, Legal and Regulatory Aspects of Cloud Computing

Within the Cloud, users expect to find an identical security framework as generally available in traditional IT environments. Items such as controlled access, data security and data protection need to be ensured and not assumed.

The following points are considered when it comes to Security under Cloud Computing :

• Between the supplier and the user, SLAs need to be defined to ensure transparency of services supplied, especially in the case of outages.

• In principle, Cloud Computing, as a new form of sourcing, does not lead to new challenges on a legal and regulatory basis.

• The importance of reviewing the security and the legal & regulatory aspects increases significantly when Public Clouds are being used.

• It is up to the providers to set-up the necessary frameworks that guarantee the user a secure processing environment adhering to the legal standards, rules and regulations within the country the user is registered in.

• Prior to using Cloud Services, organizations should obtain a clear and transparent overview from the supplier which services are performed under which conditions.

• The definition of clear, agreed upon SLAs and KPIs covering availability, quality of service and adherence to data security and legal/regulatory requirements is essential.

• Once the overall structure of the services is defined, details should be documented in a contract defining duration of the services, payment cycles and clauses for termination and liability in case of non-delivery.

• Additionally, organizations should include what needs to be done when services are taken out of the Cloud or obtained from a different supplier.

Conclusion

All major providers offer services in the Cloud, which can bring enormous advantages to large, small and midsized companies when properly implemented and used. A clear understanding of the different types of Cloud Services and their advantages, disadvantages and related risks need to be evaluated prior to making a decision on how to use the Cloud.

There are challenges in implementing Cloud services, which are similar to those inherent in IT sourcing engagements and can be successfully dealt with when addressed in a structured way.

The recommendations outlined in this post should serve as a starting point to effectively address a number of challenges under industries which enables to evaluate to which extent the available cloud services can be used in an optimal and secure manner.

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