Release notes for IBM Rational Performance Tester

This document contains information about what's new, installation instructions, known issues in IBM® Rational® Performance Tester, and contact information of IBM Customer Support.

Contents

Product description

You can find the description of Rational Performance Tester.

Rational Performance Tester is a scripting-free environment for automating load and scalability testing of web, ERP, and server-based software applications. Rational Performance Tester provides rich and customizable reporting to help you identify the presence and cause of system bottlenecks. It captures the network traffic that is rendered when the application under test interacts with a server. This network traffic is then emulated on multiple virtual users while you play back the test. See Rational Performance Tester overview.

What's new

You can find information about the features introduced in this release of Rational Performance Tester.

  • Support to control test runs for error handling

    A new error condition Test Verdict Failed is added to Error handling to manage the test when the overall verdict of the test is failed. The error condition can control the behavior of the test and can contribute to the health of the test. See Error conditions.

  • Support to delete any row or all rows in datasets

    You can now use new two methods to delete rows in a dataset. When you use IDatasetController in a custom code, you can use the following two methods to delete rows:

    IDatasetController.deleteRows(fromIndex, toIndex) - You can use this method to specify a range of rows to delete. The index starts at 1.

    IDatasetController.deleteAllRows() - You can use this method to delete all the rows in the dataset.

    See Deleting rows in a dataset.

  • Customizing names of exported statistical reports

    You can now specify a pattern that defines the file names of the exported statistical reports when you run tests from the command line. See Command-line parameters.

Deprecated capabilities

You can find information about the capabilities that are deprecated in this release and are planned for a removal in a future release.

Note: You can contact the IBM Client Support team if you have any concerns.
  • No capabilities were deprecated in this release.

Removed capabilities

No capabilities were removed in this release.

Installing the product

You can find information about the installation instructions for Rational Performance Tester.

Installing Rational Performance Tester

For installation instructions, see Installation of the product by using IBM Installation Manager.

Upgrading

  • You can upgrade to Rational Performance Tester 10.5.3 from 10.5.0 only.

  • If you installed Rational Performance Tester that is earlier than 10.5.0, then you cannot upgrade the product to the latest version. You must uninstall the existing version of the product before you install the latest version of the product.
  • After you install Rational Performance Tester 10.5.3, at any point in time if you want to use the previous version of the product, you cannot roll back to the previous version. If you want to use the previous version of the product, you must uninstall the existing version, and then install the required version of the product.

For installation instructions, see Installation of the product by using IBM Installation Manager.

Known issues

You can find information about the known issues identified in this release of Rational Performance Tester.

Table 1. Release documents - Fix list and known issues
Product Download document Knowledge Base

Rational Performance Tester

Release document

Knowledge articles

Known problems are documented in the download document for each product and in the form of individual technotes in the Support Knowledge Base:

The knowledge base is continually updated as problems are discovered and resolved. By searching the knowledge base, you can quickly find workarounds or solutions to problems.

Contacting IBM Rational Software Support

You can find information about IBM technical support assistance for Rational Performance Tester.

  • For contact information and guidelines or reference materials that you might need when you require support, read the IBM Support Guide.

  • For personalized support that includes notifications of significant upgrades, subscribe to Product notification.

  • Before you contact IBM Rational Software Support, you must gather the background information that you might need to describe your problem. When you describe a problem to an IBM software support specialist, be as specific as possible and include all relevant background information so that the specialist can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers to these questions:
    • What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
    • Do you have logs, traces, or messages that are related to the problem?
    • Can you reproduce the problem? If so, what steps do you take to reproduce it?
    • Is there a workaround for the problem? If so, be prepared to describe the workaround.