A couple weeks ago, New Relic launched a new hosted, on-demand Java profiling tool. We’re big fans of New Relic (great for Ruby or Java), dynaTrace (great for .NET or Java), and other application performance monitoring tools because they complement our website load testing and website monitoring services so well.

At BrowserMob, we’re a Java shop, and so it didn’t take long for us to have an opportunity to try out New Relic’s Java profiler. We were getting reports from some customers that viewing the response time charts of their monitoring data was occasionally slow (don’t worry, we didn’t miss the irony.)

To investigate the problem, we turned on New Relic’s profiler and selected 5 minutes of profiler time. You can choose between 1 and 10 minutes as the length of time you want to gather data. During that time, there is a small but potentially noticeable hit in performance on your site, but the upside is that the profiler is able to inspect deep in to our codebase and expose bottlenecks.

Five minutes later, we instantly saw the problem:

As you can see, during that 5 minute period, 55% of the time was spent on java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead. Tracing back a bit, we were able to see that was from a call by MonitoringController.selectRangeForObject. It turned out we were calling a cloud-based data server that was having performance issues due to the way we constructed our API call. It didn’t take more than a few minutes to optimize the call and roll out the fix.

Such is the power of application performance monitoring tools. If you’re doing any sort of load testing, website monitoring, or page optimizations, you’re going to be very blind unless you have access to information like this. That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to partner with New Relic and dynaTrace and encourage all our customers to look at their products.

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.NET · dynaTrace · Java · Load Testing · Monitoring · New Relic · Profiler · Untitled

We’re a few weeks late to the story, but we think it’s still important to call attention to: Watir and Selenium are joining forces. For those unfamiliar with Watir or Selenium, both of them are open source browser automation frameworks. For years they have been “competing” in the open source community, with Watir winning favor among the Ruby community and those who needed strong IE support, while Selenium won favor among the Java and C# crowds and those who really valued cross-browser support.

While both projects had their pluses and minuses, it’s great to see them finally working together. On behalf of BrowserMob (which builds on top of Selenium) and as a Selenium contributor, it pleases me to know end to know that the Selenium community will now gain two huge contributions: a first-class Ruby API and all the benefits of Watir’s fantastic IE support.

Note: this is not a merger. Watir will continue to run as an independent project and it will even still work with it’s own browser backend. The important thing here is that Watir will now offer an option to wrap around Selenium WebDriver, the core cross-browser automation library that all the other Selenium projects also wrap around. This means that while the projects will remain independent there will likely be a lot more cooperation moving forward.

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Selenium · Watir · WebDriver

uTest, the world’s largest community of on-demand QA professionals, launched a major update to their customer portal over the weekend. The changes included a bunch of good stuff for both testers and end-users, including:

• A brand new Flash-based UI that loads much faster than before and is much easier to use.
• Backend optimizations to allow the uTest to continue to grow beyond their already impressive 25K+ community of testers
• A brand new API allowing for more advanced integration and partnerships.

We’re most excited about uTest’s new API support. While it requires APIs that are not yet available, we’re really excited about the prospects of being able to utilize the uTest community programatically. We hope that soon we’ll be able to offer a fully integrated service in which BrowserMob customers can simply click a checkbox to have dozens of professional QA engineers participate in a load test, verifying functionality and recording their experience as thousands of automated browsers slam the site.

We’re really excited about the power of combining the cloud and the crowd to facilitate modern website testing. And if you have a need to augment your QA team, you should definitely check out uTest, especially now that the portal looks so good!

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Crowd · uTest

Today we’re extremely excited to announce another industry-first in the world of load testing: video capture.

From day one, we always believed that cloud computing ushered in an era where the majority of website load tests could and should be done using real browsers, something no one else had considered before. Doing so made scripting painless, load tests more realistic, and provided better error reporting through the use of screenshots.

Today we’ve raised the bar by also capturing video for every unique failure in a load test. This means that you can now see exactly what led up to the failure and even get a feel for what the user experience was like as your site began to break down.

In addition we also now capture the source HTML (ie: DOM structure) of the web page in the event of a failure, as well as the entire set of request and response headers for the failed transaction. This gives unparalleled information that is simply not available in the traditional load testing approach that relies on headless/virtual users.

We have a lot more great features in store for both our website load testing and website monitoring products, but we’re especially excited about this one. It’s available today so please check it our for yourself and let us know what you think.

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Load Testing · Video

Today we are pleased to announce several major improvements to BrowserMob’s monitoring service, as well as a brand new website:

• Drastically improved charts, including object-level performance charts
• Three new locations: New York City, Amsterdam, and Singapore
• Raw HTTP header captures for any failed transaction
• A brand new website, including a major update to our free Instant Test tool

Please check them out, or continue reading for more information.

Improved Charts

The number one feedback we received with our monitoring product was that while it was fun and easy to script real browsers, the charting left a lot to be desired. So we completely overhauled the charts, making them faster and more responsive. They also now break down each monitoring location use rich, vibrant colors, making it easy to see if you have performance issues in certain geographies.

In addition, we introduced object-level charting. Now when you view an individual transaction you’re going to be able to drill down to view individual object performance over time. Simply click on that element and you’ll be presented with a chart that plots response time for that individual HTTP request, broken down by each geography.

Three New Locations

We’ve added support for three new cloud-based locations, all powered by Voxel, a fantastic CDN and cloud computing provider. They are: New York City, Amsterdam, and Singapore. These locations are currently in beta and their long-term status will depend on how well they perform. So please try them out and let us know what you think. This brings our total locations up to seven, as we already support San Francisco, Dallas, Washington DC, and Dublin.

Raw HTTP Captures

In order to give you better root-cause analysis of monitoring failures, we now give you the ability to view the raw HTTP wire traffic for any failed test. This will tell you what HTTP headers were sent for every single GET or POST issued by the browser. Whether you leverage a large CDN or run a one-server deployment, this additional information should be very useful.

Brand New Website

Finally, we extremely happy to have rolled out a new website and complete UI overhaul for our monitoring and load testing services. In addition, we’ve completely rewritten our free Instant Test tool to make it faster, easier to use, and provide more actionable data analysis. Please try it out and let us know what you think!

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Monitoring · Performance