 | Performance reporting in Rational Performance Tester
The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is applicable to the
various analysis reports that come with IBM® Rational® Performance Tester. These
reports, complete with easy-to-use features, not only enhance your visual experience of
test results, but also enable you to identity application bottlenecks rather easily. The
purpose of these reports is to enable you to run as many performance tests as possible
during the test phase, with as little burden as possible incurred from using the tool.
Part 4 of this series discussed the following:
- The performance testing process
- An introduction to analysis reports and counters
- How to navigate to reports
- Report term definitions
- Detailed information about the Performance and Page Element reports
Overview
The emphasis of this tutorial is to showcase the feature-rich reporting capabilities
built into Rational Performance Tester. The examples use the standard test application
DayTrade as the application under test. Some of the reports captured here are
purely for illustrative purposes.
Part 4 of this series discussed the Performance and Page Element reports in detail. This
tutorial discusses the following report types, which are included in Rational Performance
Tester:
- Percentile report
- Verification report
- Transaction report
Citrix and SAP reports are outside the scope of this tutorial, and therefore will not be
discussed.
This tutorial will first drill down to the types of reports that are readily available in
Rational Performance Tester. Subsequently, it will look at the available features
surrounding the reporting capabilities, such as navigation, customization, and report
export.
The reporting features can be divided into the following categories:
-
Remote Analysis. This feature allows you to examine the analysis reports offline.
You can import the entire project to run offline (for example, on your laptop when you
travel). You do not need to have access to the test center to be able to analyze
reports.
-
Report Comparison. You can compare performance analysis reports from different
runs. Each run (with a different load) yields different results that can be compared for
trend analysis. An easy way to do a quick report comparison is provided online, because
each run is automatically saved with a timestamp. To compare reports, you can do so side
by side online, or export the reports (see the following bullets).
-
Report Customization. This capability allows you to customize the reports that
are of most concern to you. Though Rational Performance Tester provides several reports,
you may only need specific ones in order to pinpoint a performance bottleneck. In this
case, customizing reports gives you exactly the information that you want.
-
Exporting Reports. You can export performance analysis reports to HTML, CSV, and
XML formats. You might do this to present to third-party or higher management
stakeholders (because the formats are portable), or to compare reports.
The remainder of this tutorial explores each topic in more details.
Types of reports
Rational Performance Tester provides application- and resource-level analysis reports.
Application analysis reports have everything to do with application system performance
related issues, such as page or page element response time, page hit, page or page element
throughput, and so on. On the other hand, resource analysis reports relate system
resources utilization such as CPU, memory, disk, and network throughput. Currently, there
are three resource monitoring data collected:
- IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring (ITM)
- Microsoft® Windows® Performance Monitor (
PerfMon)
- Linux®/UNIX®
rstatd
In Rational Performance Tester, the performance test reports that are provided are HTTP,
SAP, and Citrix, of which the latter two require extensions (SAP and Citrix reports will
not be discussed in this tutorial). HTTP performance reports, which will be discussed in
greater detail in the following sections, come in the different categories that are
summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of additional HTTP
Analysis reports in Rational Performance Tester
|
Report Category
|
Report Tab Name
|
Description
| | Percentile Report | Summary | The percentile report graphs show response time versus page counter for response
time distribution for all pages in three types of percentile: 85th,
90th, and 95th. | | Verification Report | Summary | A line graph representing the summary of percent page verification points passed
for all pages, with each point referring to an interval. | | | Page Verification Points | A table showing the information of page verification points' pass, fail, and
percent pass on a per page basis | | | Page Element Verification Points | This report shows the element verification point pass count, fail count, and
percent pass. | | Transaction Report | Overall Transaction | This report presents the average execution time for all transactions, with each
point representing an interval. | | | Duration vs. Time | A line graph showing the details of each page or element that contributed to the
transaction. | | | Transaction Throughput | The first graph shows the transaction start and complete rate measured in seconds.
The second graph shows the user load progress as the test runs. |
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