Listeners to visualise results of load test in JMeter

Question

I want to run a load test in non-GUI mode and save the results in a .csv file. (I have not modified the .properties files, so the standard information are saved)

I plan to load this file and visualise the results with JMeter’s Listeners.

Which Listeners are suited for this purpose? Which should I avoid at all cost, as they might cause me to misinterpret the information? (e.g. in View Results Tree the Response Data is empty as I have - obviously - not saved this. However, there has in fact been a response. If all I saw was the Listener I might think there hasn’t been one. Since I want to avoid this, the Listeners have to gain all information needed from the .csv file.)

I’d like to know about both JMeter Listeners as well as plugins.

Answer 1

If you are running your test in non-UI mode ideally you should disable all the listeners in the script. Use '-l' option to store the test results with .jtl extension. You can later open this jtl file from JMeter.

Aggregate Report or Summary report should be good to summarize the test results and get response time and throughput.

If you want to plot graphs to see trends over the test duration you can use http://jmeter-plugins.org/#/ Standard and Extra lib set.

I would suggest following listeners:

1. Response Codes per Second

2. Response Latencies over Time

And for further details you can refer to http://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/GraphsGeneratorListener/

Answer 2

You can control what is being stored in .jtl results file by tweaking relevant properties. If you look up properties starting with jmeter.save.saveservice in jmeter.properties file you will be able to see default values and change them accordingly.

For instance to be able to see response data change jmeter.save.saveservice.response_data property value to true.

However for large loads flushing response data to disk will cause additional overhead on JMeter side so I would recommend storing response data only for failed samplers, it is controllable via jmeter.save.saveservice.response_data.on_error property.

In any case you will have to switch response data format to be XML instead of default CSV which is not good from JMeter performance point of view so maybe it worth adding a Simple Data Writer configured to store extra information for failed samplers and go with defaults (or better with the configuration mentioned in JMeter Performance and Tuning Tips guide for the main test).