3 New Tools to Organize Your Data in BlazeMeter

The BlazeMeter relocation to its new Perforce home brought with it the maturation and delivery of a few meaningful data management capabilities to the continuous testing platform – an increased number of labels, tagging, and advanced search.\

As your product expands, the amount of testing grows with it, and you need to view, index and search for your data in a simple and easy manner.

In this blog post I will cover three data management tools delivered recently, and best practices for their use.

1. View All the Test Labels

Creating tests with hundreds of labels is not considered a best practice. However, sometimes it is unavoidable. Consider a case where you want to test an end-to-end user flow in your application, and need a multi-test with multiple scenarios, each covering a different part of the flow.

Previously, the overall number of labels supported in a test was limited to 300. Now, we have increased that limit to 900 per test, 300 per engine.

With the new limit you can create a multi-test with 10 scenarios, with an average of 90 labels in each. You can review the detailed Request Stats for all your 900 labels and analyze the results – all in a single performance report. 

Although supported, finding the relevant label in a report that includes hundreds of labels – can be tricky. If you find yourself in that position, avoid generic label names by making the label names meaningful. For example, instead of “flights_01”, “flights_02” and “flights_03” to test your Flights app, try “load page”, “reserve” and “purchase” instead. An example of filtering by label is shown here.

2. Index Tests and Reports by Tags

Tags are the most convenient way to index data, and they are now available in performance testing for tests, multi-tests, and reports. 

Tags can be used to add any kind of info, and the use cases for tags can be endless. However, the greatest value of tags is in creating a logical grouping of items, especially when these items are not naturally grouped in BlazeMeter under the same project or the same test. 

Tagging tests with the APIs used in them is a wonderful way to understand the testing coverage of a specific API, sparing the need to drill down into the script of each test looking for that API. The same goes for tagging tests by the use cases or user flows included in them.

Tagging test runs by the code branch or release they are related to is a fantastic way to get an overview of each release and for understanding the impact of the related code changes. An example of tagging is shown here.

Tags are shared across your workspace, allowing you to collaborate with your teammates - everyone in the workspace can see the tags you created, reuse them, or add their own.

One final note about tags:

Tags should come with a "Highly Addictive!” warning; Before you know it, you can find yourself looking for a particular tag in an endless list. To avoid this kind of overflow, you cannot create duplicate tags in BlazeMeter, and we also defined tags as case insensitive (“Release 1.2” is the same as “release 1.2”). However, you also play a role in keeping the tags list lean. We highly recommend you standardize the tags format across your workspace or organization, and always search for an existing tag before creating a new one.

3. Advanced Search Options in Performance Testing

Every party needs chips, and every product needs advanced search capabilities. True, it took us a while to lay the groundwork, but we finally added advanced search to BlazeMeter, starting with Performance Testing.

In addition to searching by name, you can search by 10 other filters (and there is more to come). Here are some of the common use cases:

• Test creator – so that you can quickly find all the tests created by you, or even for those times when you need to take over someone else’s work
• Create date - because you KNOW you created the test last month, but you just cannot remember the name
• Execution date – to get an overview of the test runs on a specific date range, or to understand the VUH consumed on a specific month
• Locations – to get the list of tests running on a specific Private Location and reconfigure them to run on a different one 
• Tags - to get an overview of the test runs related to your latest release
• If you have access to more than one Workspace, you will also find the option to perform the search through all your workspaces – to get even a higher-level overview.

Of course, from the search results you can navigate to the tests and reports and alter them. You can also run tests, re-run reports, and stop test runs – right from the results page.

The search results can be customized: the columns, the columns order and the sorting can be adjusted to your needs, allowing you to focus on the info of your interests.

Once you are done, the table of results can be exported to csv, so that you can share it with non-BlazeMeter users or further manipulate and aggregate the data.

Now that you are equipped with these new tools to manage your data, you are all set to work more efficiently with BlazeMeter. Please try them out and tell us what you think! The BlazeMeter team is interested in your feedback, so feel free to drop us a comment here or to tell us more about your additional ideas in our Idea Portal.

START TESTING NOW