Glossary

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the Amazon cloud. BlazeMeter uses Amazon's EC2 service, which enables you to launch a dedicated cluster from one of AWS's regions. Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds, or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.

API User Key

An API user key is a 20-character alphanumeric string unique for each BlazeMeter user. This key is used for authentication while communicating with third-party tools.

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com. BlazeMeter uses Amazon's EC2 service, which enables you to launch a dedicated cluster from one of AWS's regions.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than as a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like an electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). Clouds can be classified as public, private or hybrid.

Cluster

A cluster is a collection of virtual servers in the cloud. BlazeMeter reduces the time required to set up and run tests to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your testing requirements change.

Concurrent Users

The number of users accessing the system simultaneously.

Connect Time

Measures the time it took to establish the connection, including SSL handshake

Dedicated IP

By default, BlazeMeter provides a dynamic public IP address for each engine, which changes each time a test is executed. If your project requires static or private IP addresses, BlazeMeter can provide them at additional cost.

Engine

BlazeMeter generates load using the open-source Taurus architecture, in which an engine is a virtual server that generates the actual load and simulates the number of threads (virtual users) specified in the script you provide.

GUI

"GUI" is short for "graphical user interface", and refers to the graphical on-screen window a user clicks and types within. (Also referred to as UI, noted below in this glossary.)

Hits per Second (Hits/s)

The Hits/s KPI captured in the report depends on your script configuration. Refer to the Summary Report guide for additional details.

Iteration

"Iteration" refers to the number of times an entire test (or an entire thread group, when using JMeter) is performed.

JMeter

Apache JMeter is an open-source software testing solution originally created by the Apache Software Foundation and is a popular tool for performance testing.

JTL file

JMeter can create text files containing the results of a test run, referred to as "JTL" files. There are two types of JTL files: XML and CSV files. BlazeMeter Reports are stored with the ".jtl" file extension.

KB/s (KBytes/s)

Kilobytes (kb) per second.

KPI

Key Performance Indicator. A measurable value, for example an average response time, CPU, memory, bandwidth, and so on.

Latency

The time from sending the request, processing it on the server side, to the time the client received the first byte.

Median

This is a standard statistical measure. The Median is the same as the 50th Percentile where half of the samples are smaller than the median, and half are larger.

PaaS

Platform as a Service (Paas) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.

Ramp-up

The duration it will take to start all the threads (virtual users).

Sample

A sample is an HTTP(s) request sent as a result of an action taken by the test script.

Selenium

Selenium is an open-source testing framework that makes direct calls to the web browser using the browser’s native support for automation. Selenium scripts are run at predefined intervals throughout the duration of the test. This results in simulating an actual user browsing the web application. Selenium is a popular tool for UI functional testing.

UI

"UI" is short for "user interface", and refers to the graphical on-screen window a user clicks and types within. (Also referred to as GUI, noted above in this glossary.)

VPC

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations using the resources.

Variable Unit Hours (VUH)

Variable Unit Hours (formerly known as Virtual User Hours) is the single metric used to measure usage of all capabilities across the entire platform, such as Performance testing, Functional Testing, Mock Services, and so on.