jmeter-cookbook

Configures a system load-testing with Apache JMeter.

Requirements

There is a hard requirement of both Chef and Java for this package to install. We accomplish installing both of these by using additional dependency cookbooks which target the operating system family and install the appropriate software from either the package management system or a source URL. These settings are completely configurable using Chef JSON attributes with either the Chef Solo or Chef Zero commandline tools.

Cookbooks

The dependency cookbooks are resolved automatically using the Berkshelf commandline tool. They are also packaged so that Chef is able to work appropriately from the commandline. Each cookbook can be configured using the node attributes in the Chef JSON file.

The dependency cookbooks are:

• Ark cookbook
• Java cookbook
• Nokogiri cookbook (optional)

Platforms

Since the dependencies for this really boil down to the ability to install the Omnibus Chef installer we are capable of supporting nearly any platform that has that built for it. But for testing purposes the approved platforms are locked at the latest, supported versions of both Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

• CentOS (RedHat) 7.0, 6.5, 5.8
• Ubuntu 14.04, 12.04

Usage

This cookbook is designed to be flexible and light-weight. The goal was to allow for easy configuration of JMeter on the target host using a simple attributes file (JSON). Additionally, a Ruby language component is exposed so that custom test-plans can be written in wrapper cookbooks. These test plans can be deployed with software that Chef is configuring.

Packaging

Because this cookbook utilizes Berkshelf it is very easy to package up the cookbook, along with all of its dependencies, into a tarball which can be fetched over HTTP and fed into Chef Solo or Chef Zero.

bundle install --binstubs
bin/berks package

All of the cookbook dependencies must be packaged in order for the provisioning step to work properly. The easiest way to do this is using the Berkshelf package command which will create a tarball that can be uploaded to an HTTP endpoint. This endpoint can be fed into the chef-client on the commandline.

Test Plan

This cookbook embeds a Ruby plugin which allows for a test plan to be described easily inside of a recipe. A few test plans are included as files inside of this cookbook if you wish to run it manually. But inside of the default recipe we create a test plan against Google.

jmeter_plan 'google-search' do
  block do
    threads count: 10 do
      visit name: 'Google Search', url: 'http://google.com'
    end
  end
end

This lightweight resource provider in Chef will automatically generate a test plan that can be fed into JMeter on the command-line. All of the test plans will land in the directory specified by the node[:jmeter][:plan_dir] attribute. By default this is /etc/jmeter/plans.d.

Chef Zero

Using the Chef Client in local mode we can pass in attributes to configure the JMeter installation on the local machine. The dependency cookbooks can also be specified by a URL that is accessible from the host machine. The following command will install JMeter, with the attributes specified in the attributes.json file, and with the dependency cookbooks that were packaged by running the berks package command (above).

chef-client -z -j attributes.json -r http://blp.s3.amazonaws.com/jmeter-cookbooks.tar.gz

Maintainers

• Author:: John Bellone @johnbellone (jbellone@bloomberg.net)