OBIEE Performance JMeter

http://www.rittmanmead.com/2013/03/performance-and-obiee-test-build

This article is the fourth in a series about performance and OBIEE. In previously articles I described how test design should be approached, and in this article I explain in detail how to use some of the tools available to build the tests.

JMeter

JMeter is open-source software maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. It is a flexible and powerful tool that has a GUI design interface that can run on any java-supporting desktop (e.g. Windows/Linux/Mac). The test execution can be run from the GUI, or “headless” from the commandline.

To get started with JMeter, simply download it, and uncompress the archive (tgz / zip). Go to the bin folder and doubleclick on jmeter.sh or jmeter.bat. This will launch JMeter.

There are plenty of JMeter tutorials on the web and I am not going to replicate them here. Any tutorial that demonstrates how to record a web browsing session into a JMeter script should suffice for creating an initial OBIEE load test. Below I will detail some specifics that it is useful to be aware of.

• When a user clicks on a dashboard in OBIEE, the server returns shortly after the text “Loading…”. You need to make sure that your test doesn’t incorrectly accept this as the completed report. There are a couple of ways to do this:
  • Design your test so that it waits until the text isn’t “Loading…”
  • Set NewCursorWaitSeconds in instanceconfig.xml so that the “Loading…” text isn’t displayed before the query results are returned. See this blog post for more details
• The JMeter Plugins are very useful for additional graphing options and better user control (eg jp@gc – Stepping Thread Group)
• Try to use variables throughput to increase code reusability and reduce maintenance. It’s worth taking time to refactor a test that has evolved into something complex.
• Use the Constant Timer object to add think time
• Response Assertion steps are a very good way of ensuring that your test is getting the result it should at each stage. For example, to check the OBIEE login page is loading, check for Enter your user id and password..
• Use the Not option in a Response Assertion to check for things that definitely shouldn’t be there, such as Odbc driver returned an error or Loading…
• For a flexible test, parameterise the dashboard pages fetched. This is done in several stages:
  1. Add a CSV Data Set Config step, configured to read a TSV (Tab-Separated) file from a path you specify. NB relative paths in JMeter are relative to the folder that the JMeter script (JMX) resides
     

     

     
     

Load testing of OBIEE with JMeter

http://www.mkietzke.de/?p=44

Load testing of OBIEE

Posted on January 4, 2013 by matthias

I looked for a possibility to test an OBIEE system regarding performance. Therefore I want to simulate user behavior and query reports to exeute requests. I found Apache JMeter, an open-source application for load testing. Following I describe my easy setup scenario.

First I downloaded the current Apache JMeter release 2.8 for windows. After extracting I executed \bin\jmeterw.cmd and got an application window.