Why you should switch from Commercial Load Testing solutions to Apache JMeter

With DevOps movement and the increasing popularity of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, Load Testing has become a key player.

You cannot imagine nowadays deploying a new version in Production without integrating Load Testing in the pipeline. This means that you must run more and more frequent load testing on your projects to ensure time to market is met in correct quality conditions and no outages.

This is where Apache JMeter comes into play knowing it is free, almost freely available in the Cloud and easily integrated in your continuous integration pipeline.

For more information on CI/CD, you can read our blog on integrating JMeter in your build process with Maven. You will easily find on the net a lot of blogs, videos on this subject to see all the activities going around it.

JMeter

There has been some hard work on the Apache Project this year and we were one of the major contributors of this work thanks to:

• The donation of our UbikLoadPack JSON Plugin to the project. This feature make JSON a first class citizen in Apache JMeter
• The donation by a Decathlon SA and Ubik-Ingenierie of a new Dynamic Dashboard that allows you generate an HTML report for your Load Test with a wealth of informations:
  • Summary report with APDEX, Errors, Results Summary, TOP 5 Errors by Sampler
  • 15 dynamic, zoomable graphs showing throughput, response times, errors code ….

  The lack of such report in Apache JMeter was one of the major critics made to the product. It is now an old story

• The improvements made on Browser simulation of Downloaded Resources (CSS, JS, Images) which makes JMeter much more realistic in this field and much more scalable. This work has been contributed by Benoit Wiart and Philippe Mouawad, 2 members of our support Team.

The Core team and the community has also done a great job to improve many fields of JMeter,Apache JMeter 3.0 has a lot of awesome new features plus tens of bug fixes that you can discover here.
This version is the beginning of a new Era.

It is also very interesting to note that the project is more dynamic than ever with:

• New commiters invited
• A lot of Pull Requests made on its Github mirror
• An important increase in the project activity that you can see in OpenHub report

Besides, JMeter popularity keeps increasing, since our last post it has become available in the Cloud by more actors:

• • Visual Studio ALM now proposes to launch JMeter load test from the Cloud, see <a href=”https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2016/02/27/running-apache-jmeter-based-load-tests-in-the-cloud-how-to/” target=”_blank” >this</a>
  • Major APM Dynatrace has now an integration with Apache JMeter. It’s also interesting to know that their load testing offer is now based on JMeter
  • Even HP Storm Runner allows you to run a JMeter script

, same for SOASTA

Facts

To convince you it is worth considering switching your load testing to Apache JMeter and UbikLoadPack (for more protocols support and new features sponsoring) , read this comparison some Major actors.

Popularity:

Although not the most important factor, it is an interesting factor to look at, so we used Google Trends restricted to January 2014 to April 2016.

Software category

Programming category

It is interesting to see that JMeter popularity is very high (compared to other tools) and increases in the Programming category which makes it an important actor in the DevOps movement.