whats new in HP Performance Center 12?

Businesses and clients are looking for faster delivery of applications than ever before, but still require a gold standard of quality. Built with the customer in mind, Apps 12 enables customers to deliver applications with unprecedented velocity, while maintaining first-rate quality and performance. Apps 12 provides the ability to build, test and deliver at all levels of scale; adding unparalleled flexibility necessary to support the wide range of technologies and environments that encompass the new style of IT. In pressing times for customers to produce faster and better than ever, HP provides application development and testing teams a partner in which to guide them through these ever-changing demands.

In addition to speed, delivering a successful app is an enterprise’s top priority. An application’s performance largely determines its success and whether or not the app will be used. If it doesn’t work properly, it will not provide users with any end benefits. To ensure an app’s performance is up to par, it is essential to test its performance properly. With HP LoadRunner and Performance Center software, the market-leader in performance engineering and load testing, users have the #1 tool to test their app’s performance thoroughly and accurately. In version 12, a multitude of enhancements were made to its testing capabilities focused around cloud, mobile and continuous testing. Read on as we dive deeper into each type of testing.



Cloud Testing:

In version 12, HP Performance Center and HP LoadRunner leverage public cloud infrastructure to deploy LoadGenerators (LGs). Users can seamlessly scale up and down tests based on performance testing needs or requirements, without complicated network configurations. With the utilization of cloud testing and the ability to elastically scale up tests, the demands of customer-centric business applications are met with ease and accuracy. As a result, enterprises can significantly reduce cost and lower the overall overhead of managing dedicated infrastructure.

With cloud based LGs, HP LoadRunner and Performance Center significantly reduce the provisioning time of performance testing, while maintaining the same level of security and control. Specifically in LoadRunner, users can add multiple cloud accounts and manage their network profiles for connecting to their various LGs. With Performance Center, existing cloud accounts can be managed centrally via Lab Management, and LGs can be allocated to individual projects. In addition, users can provision hosts and manage their usage with the built-in reporting feature.

Mobile Testing:
In the latest version, users can now test any mobile application, whether it is built in-house or by a third party, on any platform. Users have more flexibility with mobile testing than ever before. This means fewer applications will go untested, and a wider variety of mobile clients can be covered in each test scenario.

Version 12 also allows testers to test performance the way they need it, with the most complete and realistic mobile performance testing capabilities to date. With the growth of the mobile application market, including realistic network conditions is critical to understanding how the app performs. HP LoadRunner and Performance Center are integrated with Shunra Network Virtualization to provide users with complete control over their network conditions during testing. Other benefits and enhancements of Shunra Network Virtualization include:

Improved Integration with HP software to enable you to perform network virtualization per virtual user group and to define multiple locations per load generator

New network virtualization graphs for monitoring and analysis
Added support for shared or non-shared bandwidth that simulates mobile networks

Continuous Testing:

In version 12, testing performance early and often is the name of the game. LoadRunner provides users with the tools and APIs to introduce performance testing earlier in the application lifecycle. The REST API’s automatically trigger performance tests to be done from CI/build systems, and matched against service level agreements (SLAs) for consistent updates. By leveraging unit tests and automated testing processes, users are able to provide early feedback to the developers, which keep the lifecycle from falling behind.

The Performance Application Lifecycle (PAL) feature in Performance Center allows for complete end-to-end testing and DevOps feedback. Users can accurately compare performance test results with real production data benchmarks gathered from HP Application Performance Monitoring products. Analysis of these results provides important feedback that can help users fine-tune their performance test scenarios to resemble realistic environments as closely as possible, which reduces test assumptions and risks.