What's New

Check out the new features and improvements in Performance Center 12.56 and 12.57.

In this topic:

What's New in Performance Center 12.57

The following features and enhancements were added in Performance Center 12.57:

• What's New video. Watch this video to learn more about the new features in Performance Center 12.56 and 12.57:

• TeamCity CI plugin. Added a new plugin for TeamCity, enabling performance and load tests to be run as part of your TeamCity CI process. For more details, see Performance Center and TeamCity.

• Team Foundation Server CI plugin. Added a new plugin for Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) enabling performance and load tests to be run as part of your TFS CI process. For more details, see Performance Center and TFS.

• Start run enhancements. Updated the start run mechanism so that failure to connect to the default monitors does not fail the start run.

• Performance Improvements.

  • Run Initialization screen: Reduced the number of queries to the event log table.

  • Performance Test Designer: Improved Scheduler performance when working with large-scale tests.

  • Timeslots page: Reduced loading time.

• Resource management enhancements

  • Reduced the chance of run failure due to resource allocation issues by improving the resource allocation algorithm.

  • Reduced the chance of host resources being unavailable by limiting the circumstances in which Performance Center moves host resources from "Operational" to "Non-operational" status.

• Stability improvements

  • Fixed a crash in the Controller when running JMeter tests.

  • Resolved excessive memory usage when editing large-scale tests in Performance Center.

  • Reduced the chance of collate failures.

  • Improved Data Processor task handling and reduced analysis data issues.

• Improved handling of Analysis templates. Performance Center now supports the creation of analysis data with results containing a large number of graphs. Note that we do not recommend saving more than 30 graphs in a template.

• Help Center updates. We made the following documentation changes:

  • Added example diagrams showing various Performance Center deployments and network communication paths. For details, see Performance Center Deployments.

  • The help center now includes advanced site search functionality:

    • Intuitive friendly Google-like search

    • Search across all ADM help centers

    • Filter search results by selected products

    • Get results from separate deliverables, such as PDFs and APIs, in one place

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What's New in Performance Center 12.56

The following features and enhancements were added in Performance Center 12.56:

Elastic load generators

Added support for elastic provisioning and de-provisioning of Linux load generator resources using Kubernetes, without having to rely on load generators defined in the lab.

• Load generator capacity can be provisioned dynamically in response to workload, by assigning elastic (dockerized) load generators to your test. For details, see Manage Elastic Load Generators and Assign elastic load generators to a test.

  

• Manage your orchestrators and load generator images from the Orchestration tab. For details, see Set up elastic load generator provisioning.

Load generator assignment

We've streamlined the process for distributing and managing load generators, and improved the terminal sessions workflow.

• You can specify the load generators to assign to the groups in a test from one unified dialog box. For details, see the Assign Load Generators to Groups Dialog Box.

  

• Simplified the process of defining load generator properties and configuring terminal services by combining this into the Load Generator Management Dialog Box.

  

• Added the ability to copy/paste properties from an automatch load generator to one or more automatch load generators.

• You can now define terminal sessions for multiple load generators, making it easier to scale up a large number of Vusers. For details, see How to Connect to a Terminal Session.

• Added an option to set color depth for the terminal session. For details, see Load Generator Management Dialog Box

• Added the ability to run terminal sessions using a predefined user account. For details, see Requirements for Running Terminal Sessions with Custom User Account.

Bamboo plugin

Added a new plugin for Bamboo (the plugin is available in Atlassian Marketplace). For more details, see Performance Center and Bamboo.

Click to see how to deploy the plugin and add a PC task to your job in Bamboo.

AppDynamics integration

We've added support for integrating AppDynamics monitoring data into Performance Center. This provides information on the availability and performance of software applications and the impact on user experience measured by AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring tool. For details, see AppDynamics Monitor.

Script enhancements

We added the following features to enhance the script creation and development process:

• Support added for distributed (remote) testing for JMeter tests, enabling you to run the tests in server/node mode. For details, see Upload JMeter scripts to Performance Center.

  Note: The JMeter integration feature is provided as a beta version.

• Ability to add or edit parameters in Vuser scripts. For details, see Upload VuGen Scripts.

• The new runtime settings Search feature highlights the searched-for term in all runtime settings. For details, see How to Configure Runtime Settings.

Analysis and reporting enhancements

We've extended our analysis and reporting capabilities to include:

• Ability to view transactions and get details of messages that were received during a test run in offline results. For details, see View transaction status and Find out if anything went wrong with your test.

• We also enhanced the capabilities in the messages view, enabling you to group data and to filter by type. For details, see Performance Test Run Page - Messages View.

• Automatically collate runs that are marked for automatic trending and publish trend reports without having to manually run the collate, analyze, or publish process. For details, see Select an automatic trending option.

• Modernized the HTML reports and added a reporting summary report. For details, see Reporting Summary.

• Improved anomaly detection performance by reducing memory consumption.

• Improved Analysis performance for analyzing larger result files from Performance Center.

Administration dashboard

We've made the following enhancements to Performance Center Administration:

• Added a new dashboard to Performance Center Administration which provides a synopsis of host resource usage and test run information across all projects in the system. For details, see Dashboard.

• Added the ability to view run details from the Runs page. For details, see Manage Performance Test Runs.

• Added the ability to configure time zone and display format settings. For details, see Performance Center Administration user interface.

LoadRunner Agent configuration

Added the ability to configure the Windows account under which the LoadRunner Agent is running to allow TruClient for IE to run successfully. This can be done without having to physically log on to the load generator machine from either Hosts management (in Performance Center Administration), or from the Testing Hosts module (in My Performance Center).

REST APIs

Performance Center’s support for API testing now includes the following updates:

Manage timeslot reservations	Now you can create or delete a timeslot, retrieve a list of existing timeslots, and check if a timeslot can be allocated. For details, see Manage timeslots.
Update version control status	Use the new versioncontrol API to return or update the version control status of a test. For details, see Version Control.
Add Dockerized load generators	Specify different host types, including dynamic (dockerized) load generators when creating a test. For details, see test entity XML.
Create and get test instances	Use the new testInstances APIs to add test instances to a test set, or to get all existing test instances in the project. For details, see Add test instance and Get all test instances.
Manage cloud hosts (PC Admin)	Performance Center administrators can now provision and terminate a host on the cloud, get a list of all provisioned hosts and provision requests, and get the status of all cloud hosts. For details, see Manage cloud hosts.

Other enhancements

Various other enhancements to Performance Center include:

• Added a collate and analyze progress bar.

• Added ability to add attachments that provide additional information about the test to scripts, tests, and test runs. For details, see Add Attachments / Attachments Tab.

• Expanded ability to view test dependencies in Performance Center by displaying all tests in which the selected script is used in the Test Plan module (see Vuser Script Details Pane), and all tests in which the selected monitor profile is used in the Test Resources module (see Monitor Profile Pane). You can also see details about monitors associated with the test in the Related Monitors Pane.

• Added support for three new regions for provisioning load generators on the cloud: Canada, Ohio, and London (provided you have upgraded to ALM 12.55 Patch 1).

Documentation changes

The Performance Center Troubleshooting Guide (PDF) was removed and the information was incorporated into the relevant sections of the online help.

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See also:

• What's New in Performance Center 12.55

• What's New in Performance Center 12.53