Unexpected traffic surges and non-performant pages can wreak havoc on your users — and ultimately on your business. At SOASTA, we care about ensuring that your site is always up and running as smoothly as possible. That’s why we’re excited about the Spring 2016 release of our Digital Performance Management (DPM) platform.
We listened to your requests and have developed new features in both the testing solutions — CloudTest and TouchTest — that are part of our DPM platform. (You can also read about the new features available in mPulse, our industry-leading real user measurement solution.)
More efficient home page
At the platform level — which is common across all SOASTA products — you’ll find a new home page welcoming you every time you log in to CloudTest, TouchTest, and mPulse. This screen will automatically update with your recent activities and results, including:
- tests you’ve run,
- assets you recently created or edited,
- alerts and reports that might need your attention, and
- easy links to product resources.
While getting back to the Central screen is just a click away, customers are telling us how much they like this new view into their recent work and results.
Git version control
“Everything is code.” It’s a common saying among those embracing DevOps. With this release, our DPM platform now includes version control in a local Git repository, as well as the ability to connect to a remote Git repo to manage assets such as clips, compositions, targets, scripts, dashboards, and widgets.
Colored icons make it easy to find changed items that need to be added, checked in (pushed), or have their conflicts resolved. With version control, test assets are now protected against inadvertent changes and, just like code, you can easily revert to earlier versions.
Integration with Dynatrace APM
Since Digital Performance Management embraces monitoring and APM (Application Performance Management), we added integration with Dynatrace results into CloudTest and mPulse dashboards.
With data from Dynatrace, you have an additional view of back-end system monitoring along with real-time front-end measurement in mPulse, and with real-time performance and load testing results with CloudTest.
This addition of Dynatrace APM data complements our existing integrations with Amazon CloudWatch, CA Wiley, and New Relic.
Learn more: Dynatrace integration with CloudTest
Use the same JMeter scripts in development and production
Performance engineers tell us how much they like CloudTest’s scalability, dynamic ramp, real-time reporting, and ease of use. However, the developers at their companies are using open-source JMeter to test performance in development. Teams would like to use the same JMeter scripts in development and production. Now they can.
Just drag and drop your JMeter files into CloudTest to create test clips that you can bring together into complete test compositions. With the largest cloud partner network in the industry, CloudTest offers the flexibility to execute load tests automatically in your Continuous Integration (CI) system — from development through to full-scale testing in production.
The new test grid setup wizard makes it even easier to build a global grid using testing resources from all of the SOASTA partners worldwide, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, RackSpace, Google Cloud Platform, QingCloud, and others. (There are more than twenty in total.)
Advanced network emulation
As mobile continues to grow, measuring performance across the many types of networks that customers can use becomes an imperative. (Network bandwidth may be improving, but latency will never go away until the speed of light increases!) Packets will be dropped when user devices drop out of connectivity, to be requested again when the device regains the connection. Network congestion causes jitter, or variation in the delay of packet delivery.
CloudTest includes advanced network emulation with 37 network profiles built-in for instant use, plus the ability to create new ones as you need, defining all of these characteristics and more as shown in this profile creation dialog.
New TouchTest features: 3D Touch, CocoaPods support, and WKWebView compatibility
We’ve also made several upgrades to TouchTest, our mobile testing solution. This upgrade supports the latest iOS 9.3 update features, including 3D Touch (ForceTouch), plus CocoaPods support for easy instrumentation of your iOS app for TouchTest, and WKWebView compatibility in iOS applications.
This release also includes the new home screen and version control noted above.
Getting started
If you’re already a CloudTest and/or TouchTest user: There are still more features and bug fixes that are described in the release notes on CloudLink, our SOASTA community site. When you’re ready to access these great new features, upgrade by going to the About menu (you’ll find the icon in the upper right corner of the window) and choose About. In the About window you’ll find the steps to upgrade.
If you’re not a CloudTest or TouchTest user: Start your free trial.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about this release. Happy testing!
