Released today, v4.2 update 2 includes the following features and enhancements:
1. Defining Threshold Rules. To simplify monitoring servers and load agents, now you can define threshold rules. For any of the server or agent performance counters (a) you can define a warning value (b) and a critical value (c) to be monitored. When the actual value of the counter reaches the threshold, a warning or error is triggered (see http://support.stresstimulus.com/display/doc42/Threshold+Rules )
2. Reporting Threshold violations. The number of threshold violations is presented on the real-time dashboard and on the performance report. Curves on which the threshold is defined will display warning violation as orange triangles (d) and critical violations as a red crosses (e). The counters of violations (f) and (g) are displayed in the curve grid.
3. Recorder with simplified transaction builder. Now you can create a transaction just by entering its name into the recorder box (h) without clicking Start Transaction / End Transaction, as was necessary in the previous versions. After that continue navigating through the tested website. To start a new transaction, enter a new name (see http://support.stresstimulus.com/display/doc42/Creating+Transactions)
4. More granular test progress indicator. A load test typically consists of 2 main phases:
1. Running the test by specified time, number of iterations or reaching maximum users.
2. Waiting for iterations to complete or issued requests to come back.
In previous versions, a single test progress bar was used for both phases and it only accurately displayed a percentage of the progress for the 1st phase. In this version, each test phase display its own progress accurately from 0 to 100% .
5. Purging selected content types. Now you can delete (i) sessions with certain content types (j) that you aren't interested in testing (see http://support.stresstimulus.com/display/doc42/Purging+sessions+with+unwanted+content+types)
6. Excluded Content Types list. Sessions with the content types on this list will be automatically deleted from future recordings. You can add content types that create little impact on website performance.
7. Searching and deleting multiple sessions. You can specify any search criteria using wildcards or regular expressions and search headers, or bodies of requests or responses. After that, with one click (k) you can delete all sessions (l) matching search criteria.
Multiple fixes and improvements include:
- Substantially increased reliability of large distributed tests
- Fixed coordination between controller and agent in large tests when load generators are severely distressed
- Reduced time of saving large tests
- Reduced time of opening large test results
- Agent diagnostics messages, such as ran out of disk space or other exceptions, are displayed by the controller
To navigate to other parts of the v4.2 release notes, click the links below:
4.2 is available here