How-To's

Load Testing with TeamCity and BlazeMeter

imageBlazeMeter is a cloud-based load testing platform for web applications, mobile applications and web services. It can be used to simulate heavy loads on a server and analyze performance under different load types. And since there’s a TeamCity plugin for BlazeMeter available, we can use it to load test or smoke test our application during the build and deployment process.

Installing and configuring the plugin

The BlazeMeter plugin for TeamCity can be downloaded and installed into the plugins folder under TeamCity’s data folder. After restarting the TeamCity server, there is one additional step in order to be able to start using the BlazeMeter plugin for TeamCity: configuring it with our BlazeMeter user key.

Under Administration | Integrations | BlazeMeter, we can enter the user key obtained from the BlazeMeter web site (under user profile).

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Adding a BlazeMeter build step to a build configuration

To run a load test using BlazeMeter after building and deploying an application, we can add a new build step to our build configuration. The BlazeMeter plugin for TeamCity adds a new build runner type which we can select.

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The BlazeMeter plugin for TeamCity will list all available load tests in the build step configuration. We can select the test to run and specify the error percentage and response time thresholds. The total load test duration should also be specified.

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Once saved, we can run a build configuration and see load test results come in.

Inspecting load test results

After running a build configuration in which BlazeMeter is used, we will see a new report tab on the build results page: BlazeMeter Report Tab. Using this, we can analyze results of the load test run during this build.

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From this tab, we can analyze the load test results, see errors that occurred in the application during the load test run, see measured page load times and so on. We can also compare with previous load test results if needed.

A short screencast on installing and configuring the BlazeMeter plugin for TeamCity is also available.

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