DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear released LoadNinja, a cloud-based platform for engineers and performance professionals who load test web applications.

LoadNinja delivers a rare combination of efficiency, accuracy, and actionable performance data, allowing teams to incorporate load testing easily in an agile and devops environment. Unlike traditional load testing platforms that are protocol based and require tedious programming and correlation of dynamic application aspects, LoadNinja allows the engineer to focus more on building applications that scale and less on building load testing scripts.

“Application performance is critical to ensure the continued success of a digital business,” said Anand Sundaram, VP of Performance Testing and Monitoring at SmartBear. “Teams struggle to incorporate performance testing of their applications due to the unreasonable amount of time it takes to get the load testing scripts right using conventional tools. LoadNinja removes this manual effort, helps you generate the most realistic load using real browsers, and provides actionable performance data about the behavior of the web applications under conditions of stress.”  

Conventional protocol based tools have a steep learning curve and require tedious programming of recorded scripts, before they can be played back. LoadNinja, with its InstaPlay recorder, eliminates this step so recorded scripts can be played back immediately. The efficiency gains from this approach, especially when load tests are run frequently in an agile and devops setting, enable teams to focus their efforts solely on load testing and saves time previously spent in creating and massaging scripts in advance of load tests.

Unlike the load generated by conventional tools that use vendor developed proprietary browser emulators, the TrueLoad technology within LoadNinja uses real browsers at scale for load tests, creating the most realistic and accurate representation of load on the infrastructure supporting the web application under test.

The power of using real browsers for all of your load generation is also seen in the performance data returned by LoadNinja. Traditionally, load testing tools return request-response times in test results, which need to be further introspected and deciphered in order to be usable by developers and performance testers. LoadNinja obviates this additional step and directly provides actionable data in the form of browser based navigation timings that developers and performance testers are used to working with every day.

LoadNinja also provides two additional innovations in the form of the VU Inspector and the VU Debugger. The VU Inspector allows you to visualize the degradation as your virtual users generate load against the application. When a virtual user encounters an issue, the VU Debugger can be used to connect and interact with the erring virtual user’s browser to gather additional diagnostic information about the problem.

LoadNinja is being unveiled to customers at SmartBear Connect 2018, the company’s annual user conference, taking place on October 29-30, 2018 in Boston.