JMeter as a test harness

[ma0sm <st...@hotmail.com>]

I was wondering if anyone could help me.

I'm looking to do use JMeter as a Test Harness. The idea is that it will
kick off the required script with the required number of threads to simulate
the load. If testing a web app then the script can be built up using the
JMeter components, but for component level testing and java applet testing
the tests will almost certainly need to be written in JUnit.

So far, so good. One area I'm having a problem with though is that the JUnit
tests will need to write out timing information (waypoints) as they execute.
We normally do this by writing out to a text file, and our current results
formatter then imports this information and produces some pretty graphs in
Excel.

On top of this, we also have the headache of trying to monitor the load on
the application servers. Unfortunately, most of our performance testing on
our other apps involves logging directly in to servers and stuff over secure
connections and sending/receiving XML requests. Again, as far as I can see,
JMeter can only measure load on webservers, so we'd need another application
running on the application servers measuring the CPU and memory loads. Again
we already have something that does this which writes out data to CSV files,
which get imported into the results formatter and gives some more pretty
graphs.

I think the hope is that JMeter will be able to replace our current Test
Harness, our current server monitor app and our current results formatter,
but I don't think this is possible because as yet I haven't found a way of
getting JMeter to read results files back in from external applications.

I've been looking at how to set up JMeter to monitor the server side of
things, and according to the JMeter manual, you need to configure an http
request so that JMeter can request the information to be sent back to it.
This would basically mean that you can't get performance information from
the backend servers. Is that right?

What I've been able to find so far is:

"Monitor Results is a new Visualizer for displaying server status. It is
designed for Tomcat 5, but any servlet container can port the status servlet
and use this monitor. There are two primary tabs for the monitor. The first
is the "Health" tab, which will show the status of one or more servers. The
second tab labelled "Performance" shows the performance for one server for
the last 1000 samples. The equations used for the load calculation is
included in the Visualizer."

Also:

"To use the JMeter Monitor for IBM WAS5.0, you will need to port the status
servlet from Tomcat5 to WAS. Your other option is to write your own status
servlet and output the data in the correct format. Tomcat5 includes the
schema for the status data."

Have any of your guys had any experience of this? Any advice you can give on
whether it's worth pursuing any further? 
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