The key questions I would pose are: how high of a concurrent load do you need to generate against the system? How technically skilled are your personnel that will perform the load testing? How much programmable/scripting/code based control do you desire from the tool? Do you prefer more of a GUI based tool or a programmatic code/scripting based tool? JMeter will be for those that want a GUI, moderate to low scripting/code based control/programmability, moderate to low load generation, and for users experienced in the novice to expert range.
This is the go to tool for all the web service testing needs. You can do functional testing, regression testing, automate the testing and drive the data from external sources like a Excel spread sheet or an xml document and finally performance testing. It can get better in scenarios where the response is to be compared with UI, with more automation. The license cost needs to be considered when there are many open source tools out there in the market.
Easy to construct Webservices script - You just need to add a sampler with the endpoint, payload and header information. And boom you can run a load test on the service with varying load and capture the response time and throughput. In a commercial tool like Loadrunner or Silkperformer, this process would take at least couple of hours, while with Jmeter we can do this in 10 minutes or less.
Modularizing the scripts - Jmeter has a very good way of organizing the scripts and the reusability of the existing script (transactions) is also as easy as copy pasting the script.
Jmeter tests can be run from anywhere, so you can run it from the idle webserver itself if you have some firewall restrictions to test it from your local or other environment.
Jmeter distributed tests can be spawn from the AWS and results collated to see the performance from different regions in the world.
The tool is built in such a way that you need minimum to no experience in API testing and you can start using it from day 1. It's that easy. And many features like configuring many end points and choosing the one [on] which you want the tests to be run, easy import of wsdl, etc. are very helpful.
Characterizing the tests and driving the data from external sources like Excel or xml document is easy and very powerful to automate tests. Many assertions are very well built in.
Automating the APIs using this tool is very efficient and easy. It also offers some UI level automation embedded in it so it makes life lot easier to compare the response vs UI.
Performance testing of APIs is also built in and so it makes a one stop solution for all testing needs for API.
Even though it has very easy installation, you can run into issues easily. I was ab;e to trigger a test at browser level but couldn't stop the tests. I had to kill it from task manager and then had to reinstall from begining.
There are so many things in JMeter you can do especially with the sampler for selenium for UI tests. More documentation/webinars etc.. would help the community better.
The jmx files should have an easy way to be integrated with ci/cd tools and cloud.
Price, Wiki and user sharing. Having access to the information provided by the developers and other open source providers is key for me. The ability to share information and get answers directly is very important to success in software testing. And the price of this product currently is amazing. Too many companies charge way too much money for products that are far behind in their value and pertinence
I can jump right into a new test plan and start building from scratch. The natural progression from test plan to thread group and then designing the basic format of the process is very streamlined and smooth. With only slight modifications I can build out a very complex model from a very basic beginning.
I have been using JMeter for the last year. By using this tool, you can make sure the system will work under varied loads. It helps us to simulate real time scenarios by creating required virtual users and make sure the application will work under load. Perform load, stress, and stability testing using JMeter.
I have evaluated LOADUI (web free version) and it was a very unstable tool and I could not rely on those results completely as I was not sure how the tool was performing. It only generated the top 10 less transaction times and when Jmeter was in use, it was very effective in using plugins to accommodate more outputs.
It helped to estimate resources required for a particular client requirement. For example if the client wants the application to be used by 500 users for 1 hour, based on the load test we perform for 500 users and 1 hour we recommend resources and their capabilities.
Jmeter was used to identify bottleneck. This would lead to better performance.
It has been of tremendous help as the ONE STOP TOOL to test the APIs end to end. Ease of use is great and their support staff is excellent. They always conduct brown bag sessions for us to learn about new features. Overall it has given us a great ROI considering how fast we can test and deliver to market.
