Depending on the coverage required from the testing practice, the integration with external tools can be a crucial point in tool selection. For example, the integration with observability platforms gives you the ability to massively expand your understanding of what is happening when a certain load is injected into the system and what are the main issues.
All performance testing tools return the basic metrics you can expect, such as response time, throughput, error rate, and so on. Most of the tools can also extract information from the SUT (i.e. system under test), such as:
- CPU consumption;
- Memory consumption;
- Network usage;
- Disk usage.
An observability platform adds to your analysis capabilities. It allows deeper visibility into single requests (traces) on each service and down to database queries.
The integration between the performance testing suite, the observability platform, and the development pipeline can also allow automated performance validation of the code, allowing you to test it before it reaches production and validate performance constraints.
Tricentis Neoload and Micro Focus LoadRunner have solid foundations to integrate themselves into a performance ecosystem, including raw metrics from hosts (e.g. Sitescope for Micro Focus LoadRunner) or application performance monitoring tools, such as Dynatrace. Tricentis Neoload also natively integrates with Gremlin, one of the most widely used chaos engineering platforms.
The other tools in our list do not have as strong an integration with the performance tooling ecosystem, but custom solutions are usually present.