Item: BlazeMeter
Rating: 3
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlazeMeter

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We user Blazemeter to load and stress test several online radio streaming websites managed by my company. As far as I know it was being used by my department only at the time.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Blazemeter has very intuitive and uncluttered UI. It is very easy for a beginner to figure out and get started.
Blazemeter allows several methods of creating performance tests - using several popular open source applications. Therefore most often there is no need to learn to use a new tool or language.

Cons

Blazemeter reporting is very basic and shallow. There is no way to drill down or correlate. I can get better reports by using JMeter for free.
Blazemeter is very costly. Testing with volumes of more than 1K cu is expensive, and can be done for much cheaper if a company/team is willing to invest a bit of time to figure out how to use cloud instances and JMeter slaves, and to write a basic script to collect resulting xml output.

Return on Investment

Running a performance test to determine how much load our site could sustain gave us some needed insight.

Personally, I prefer using JMeter + Redline13, however we had some business folks that wanted to be able to run a few of their own tests. The non-technical individuals preferred to use Blazemeter because of its simple and intuitive UI.

Other Software Used

JMeter

Likelihood to Recommend

Performance testing is a complex concept to grasp and Blazemeter is easy to get started with. So if a completely non-technical beginner needed immediate results and cost was not an issue, I would recommend Blazemeter as a temporary, short term solution. However, if the individuals intention is to execute performance testing regularly, I would strongly encourage them to consider other means. For example Redline13 + JMeter.

Comments

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Richard Dachowski
commented a year ago
I have heard that one approach of using Blazemeter is to create Jmeter script(s) that primarily increase the load on the backend portions of a web application while still running another Jmeter script that exercises the front-end user interface of the web application. While this is certainly worthwhile testing to be done, the validation of individual web application apis or functions under a reasonable amount of load should be done as early in the Agile development process as possible (preferably during Unit or Integration testing). By the time the end to end web application transactions are ready for performance testing, the load testing programs need to focus on as much as possible stressing the limits of the actual web applications HTTP requests and responses and all the various infrastructure resources that are involved with servicing those HTTP requests/responses. Comments?

BlazeMeter is great if you need results now and have no idea what you are doing

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