StormRunner Load – Latest tool in Cloud based Performance Testing landscape

The steadily increasing access to internet is opening up greater opportunities for companies to create and expand their markets. As applications and software are increasingly being used to establish digital connections with the stakeholders, enterprises are looking for ways to consolidate concurrent user activity and avoid downtimes.

With the deployment of streamlined sales campaigns, spikes in transactions on festival seasons and countless such occasions, analytics driven marketing strategies demand the software and the computer environment to withstand enormous and often steep spikes in engagements. Some of the scenarios include the launch of a much awaited product on an e-commerce portal, the transfer of funds from online bank accounts at the beginning/end of the month and purchase/sale of shares on trading platforms etc.

The rise in such requirements has added a business dimension to load testing because enterprises have realized the importance of ensuring that software withstands the steep hike in user activity. Simulation of workloads through Cloud based Test Tools has been an amazing solution for enterprises which need to generate enormous loads in less time on a project basis.

The launch of HP’s StormRunner Load has added to the existing array of cloud based performance testing tools like BlazeMeter, CloudTest and NeoLoad. A pure play cloud solution for Performance Testing, StormRunner Load is an added advantage to the developers in an Agile environment.

From a business perspective, the tool offers four major benefits:

1. Reduce effort and skill level: HP StormRunner Load provides easy to record and playback protocol support for Developers and testers with TruClient and TruAPI protocols. Agile teams can quickly automate the user stories and start running performance tests in quick time.
2. Geographical location simulation: All Cloud based solutions offer simulating traffic from various geographical locations by choosing the LGs. StormRunner Load makes it simpler by just choosing the user load against a geographical location without having the need to calculate the number of load generators needed to simulate the target user load.
3. Real time Analysis: StormRunner Load identifies the SLA violations and anomalies during the test based on the script, geographical location and elapsed time.
4. Monitoring Servers: StormRunner can be integrated with monitoring tools like Sitescope to provide the resource utilization on the servers

In addition, StormRunner Load also has business friendly features the include

• UI which includes a simple workflow of Upload scripts, Design performance tests and Run the tests
• Scalability for web and mobile testing
• The options to upload and save performance scripts in the cloud as assets for future use
• Alerts in the UI which notify whether the script that is uploaded is supported by StormRunner Load or not while uploading
• Comparison of the test results with previous runs
• Ability to merge graphs during the  test and confirm the trends
• Online and Offline defect detection with root cause analysis and anomaly detection

This tool falls into place to address a wide variety of business challenges by enabling performance testing in an agile environment which has short sprints and the participation of all the team members across all operations.  With an interactive UI and multiple features, StormRunner Load has the better edge in terms of ease of use by developers or other stakeholders working in an Agile environment.

By far the greatest USP of the tool is the ability to scale to enormous loads across geographical locations and capture analytics executing tests with two compelling parameters: precision and speed.