The Open Source Cloud Performance Testing Tools eBook is a collection of tools and techniques for performing performance testing of Cloud Applications. The tools described in the eBook are not specific to any particular technology or platform; they can be applied across most technology platforms (for example, enterprises that use IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS products for their Cloud needs).
The Open Source Cloud Performance Testing Tools are provided free of charge directly from the source to its users. Red Hat is committed to the open source community, and supports the development of community-led projects for cloud performance testing. These tools are intended to enable validation of Red Hat® Platform in your environment.
Httperf
Httperf is a high-performance testing tool for measuring and analyzing the performance of any web service and web application. This is mainly used to test the HTTP servers and their performance.
The main objective of this testing tool would be to count the number of responses generated from this particular server. This generates HTTP GET requests from the server which helps in summarizing the overall performance of the server.
Through this tool, you will be able to conclude the rate at which the response is sent from each server and thereby the efficiency can be calculated. The ability to sustain server overload, support HTTP/1.1 protocol and compatibility with new workload are the three key features of this performance testing tool.
This was originally developed by David Mosberger and many others at HP. This is a Hewlett Packard product.
System Requirements: Windows and Linux.
OpenSTA
Open source HTTP performance test tool: Open STA stands for Open System Testing Architecture. This is a GUI-based performance tool used by application developers for load testing and analyzing. This is believed to be a complex tool among all the other performance testing tools.
It has proven its capabilities in the past and the current toolset is capable of performing heavy load testing and analysis for scripted HTTP and HTTPS. Here, testing is carried out using recordings and simple scripts.
To carry out the test successfully, results and other statistics are taken through various test runs. The data and results can be later exported to the software for creating reports. This is a free testing tool and it will be distributed under GNU GPL and it will remain free forever. This tool was originally developed by Cyrano, which was later taken over by Quotium.
System Requirement: OpenSTA runs only on the Windows operating system.
SmartMeter.io
This load and performance testing tool provides advanced testing functions. With JMeter at its core, it will be instantly familiar to any of its users.
Creating a test on SmartMeter.io is very simple. You can make test scenarios without scripting just by clicking on an embedded browser. There’s also no proxy setup or browser plugin necessary.
It features automatically generated reports with all details about the test and its results. The results contain auto-evaluated acceptance criteria, statistics, graph comparison tool, and trend analysis of multiple test runs.
The tool is also strong in distributed testing, CI integration, and offers unparalleled performance testing support for Vaadin apps.
System Requirements: Windows, Linux, and Mac OS
Nmap
Nmap uses a discovery feature to find hosts in the network that can be used to create a network map. Network admins value it for its ability to gather information from the host about the Operating System, services, or ports that are running or are open, MAC address info, reverse DNS name, and more.
Scalability is the other big reason why network admins love Nmap. It can scan a single host or an entire network with “hundreds of thousands” of machines.
When you need to quickly map the hosts in your network, Nmap is your tool.
Traceroute NG
Ping is great. Traceroute is better. But both fall short in modern networks (and especially with internet-based targets because the internet is intrinsically multi-path). A packet has multiple ways to get to a target at any moment. You don’t need to know how a SINGLE packet got to the destination; you need to know how ALL the packets are moving through the network across time. Traceroute NG does that and avoids the single biggest roadblock to ping and traceroute accuracy—ICMP suppression—at the same time.
Bandwidth Monitor
If you are doing simple monitoring, the first question you’re going to want to know is, “is it up?” Following closely on the heels of that is, “how much bandwidth is it using?” Yes, it’s a simplistic question and an answer that may not really point to a problem (because let’s be honest, a circuit that’s 98% utilized most of the time is called “correctly provisioned” in our book), but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to know. This tool gets that information quickly, simply, and displays the results clearly.
PRTG Network Monitor (Network Performance)
PRTG is a network monitoring tool from Paessler that comes with easy installation and comes with a mechanism to the auto-detect network.
Lets you find out who is using the tool and for what purpose. Raises alert if something is found wrong, so helps in fixing before actual users get to face the problem. Overall it’s a good tool if you are looking for monitoring and managing your network traffic.
Visual TruView By Fluke Networks
Fluke Networks like Solar Winds provides several tools for performing all kinds of Network checks/Testing. They offer solutions for portable devices as well. TruView is an application, network performance monitoring, and troubleshooting tool and lets the user identify if the problem exists in the application, server, client or network.
Dynatrace Data Center Real User Monitoring (DCRUM)
This tool passively monitors 100% of the network traffic across all physical and virtual devices. Besides, letting the user know about network performance, this tool also tells about the impact on enterprise application performance and end-user experience, hence improving the user experience.
This allows monitoring for multiple technologies including SAP, Citrix, Oracle, VOIP, SOAP, HTML/XML web services.
Conclusion
Cloud performance testing tools are developed in open source software model so the code is freely available, reviewed, and improved by many people across the world. One can participate in the development of new features or fix existing bugs on these public sites. These Open source cloud performance testing tools are free for integration with private clouds as well as with commercial IaaS clouds.