Easily manage your JMeter plugins

on 14 January 2019 Automation, DEVOPS, JMETER, JMETER-PLUGINS, LOAD_TESTING, PRODUCTIVITY and Tags: , , , , with 0 comments

Easily manage your JMeter plugins

Apache JMeter is a very powerful performance tool by itself and thanks to it’s plugin based architecture, it allows you to enhance it by writing a plugin for custom requirements.

There are currently more than 73 free Open-Source plugins and UbikLoadPack provides enteprise plugin to:

  • support additional protocols (Video Streaming, GWT, Flex, Java Seralization)
  • increase your productivity by managing Auto-Correlation for Oracle ERP and Vaadin
  • Enhance your monitoring through APM interfacing with Dynatrace, AppDynamics and NudgeAPM

Hopefull adding plugins to JMeter has never been so easy thanks to JMeter Plugins-Manager provided by jmeter-plugins.org

Overview

The global idea of this particular plugin is that you manually install it once and then get:

  • search UI for new plugins
  • easy and automated installation of new plugins
  • easy update of plugins
  • notification of new plugins

Setup

To install jmeter-plugin:

Setup from behind a proxy

If you’re behing a proxy, then create in jmeter/bin folder a new file called:

  • setenv.cmd for Windows
  • setenv.sh for Linux/MacOSX

setenv.cmd

set JVM_ARGS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxy.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.proxyUser=ludwig -Dhttp.proxyPass=van-beethoven -Dhttps.proxyHost=myproxy.com -Dhttps.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttps.proxyUser=ludwig -Dhttps.proxyPass=van-beethoven"

setenv.sh

export JVM_ARGS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxy.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.proxyUser=ludwig -Dhttp.proxyPass=van-beethoven -Dhttps.proxyHost=myproxy.com -Dhttps.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttps.proxyUser=ludwig -Dhttps.proxyPass=van-beethove

Check installation

When you restart jmeter, a new icon appears in toolbar and that you don’t have connectivity errors in logs:

Using Plugins Manager

Installing a new plugin

Click on Icon a popup appears, select “Available Plugins” tab, enter “thread” (in this case we are looking for Custom Thread Groups plugin, notice that:

  • We have a list of results
  • When we click on one result, we see the in the right panel:
    • the documentation of the plugin and information about the Maven artifacts in highlighted part (groupId: kg.apc, artifactId: jmeter-plugins-castutg, version 2.6
  • In the bottom panel we see the jars that plugin manager will download and put in the correct folder

Let’s click on “Apply Changes and Restart JMeter“, once jmeter is restarted, click again on Icon, this time the first tab shows “Custom Thread Groups” installed

We can use this plugin by right clicking on Test Plan > Add > Threads (Users), the provided plugins will appear:

Upgrading an existing plugin

The benefit of plugins-manager is that you get automatically notified whenever a new plugin is updated, you’ll get this particular icon:

If you click on Icon, you’ll see in third tab the plugins that have an update (in this case, for the demo, I had previously renamed the jar to 2.5 to show that plugins detects that 2.6 is available):

About the author:

Philippe Mouawad is a developer, committer and member of the JMeter Project Management Committee at Apache.

He is also the co-author of the book Master JMeter : from load testing to DevOps.

He currently works as an Architect and technical expert for Ubik-Ingenierie where he leads among other things the development of UbikLoadPack a set of Commercial Plugins for Apache JMeter allowing to load test different protocols like MPEG-DASH, Http Live Streaming (HLS), HSS, HDS, GWT, JavaSerialization, Oracle applications.

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