Release notes for IBM® Rational® Performance Tester

This document contains information about what's new, installation, and known issues in IBM® Rational® Performance Tester and contact information of IBM Customer Support.

Contents

Product description

You can find the description of Rational® Performance Tester.

Rational® Performance Tester is a scripting-free environment for automating load and scalability testing of web, ERP, and server-based software applications. Rational® Performance Tester provides rich and customizable reporting to help you identify the presence and cause of system bottlenecks. It captures the network traffic that is rendered when the application under test interacts with a server. This network traffic is then emulated on multiple virtual users while playing back the test. See the Product overview.

What's new

You can find information about the features introduced in this release of Rational® Performance Tester.

  • Documentation

    You can now quickly add your comments to provide your feedback about the documentation for Rational® Performance Tester by posting to a product forum. To add your comments as feedback, you must first register at IBM Support. Your login information along with your comments are governed by the privacy policy of IBM. By commenting, you accept the terms of use of IBM.

  • Exporting test results to JSON

    When you want to analyze test results in a text format, you can now export all test results or a specific test result that you captured during a test run to a JSON file. See Methods to export test results into a JSON file.

  • Importing a CSV file with a separator character

    You can now import a CSV file that has a separator character into the dataset and configure the required separator values in the CSV Editor. See Editing datasets.

  • Adding a Verification point to an SAP object

    You can now add a verification point to an SAP object in the SAP GUI Grid View to verify the state of the SAP object after the SAP recording is complete. See Adding a verification point to an SAP GUI Grid View object.

  • Recording an SAP transaction from a running SAP GUI

    You can now record certain SAP transactions from a running SAP GUI session to create a test that contains some specific part of an SAP session. See Recording a specific SAP transaction from a running SAP session.

  • SAP extension on Windows 64-bit operating system

    You can now choose SAP extension when you install Rational® Performance Tester on Windows 64-bit operating systems.

  • Enhancements to reports and counters

    • The title of the page in a performance report is now updated with the filter value that you specified in the View Settings pane. See Filtering data in test results.

    • In a Transaction report, you can now view the number of transactions that are active during the schedule run and the number of virtual users that execute certain transactions simultaneously. See Transaction report.

    • You can now publish large test results from Rational® Performance Tester to Rational® Test Automation Server. See Publishing test results to the server.

    • When you want to analyze the additional counters on a quick view reports, you can now add percentile counters to the counter tree. See Adding additional counters on a separate page.

    • You can now define a percentile value as decimal numbers for a counter. See Modifying counters in a graph.

  • Access to a dataset from a custom code

    You can now access datasets from a custom code. When a test is associated with a dataset, you can read or write the dataset values from the custom code. See Reading and writing data from a dataset.

  • Access to the actual name of the schedule

    When you use the custom code, you can now access the actual name of the schedule in the test log. See Accessing the actual schedule name from the custom code.

  • Brotli encoding format

    HTTP tests now automatically decompress data that were compressed, by using the Brotli encoding format.

Installing the product

You can find information about the installation and upgrade instructions for Rational® Performance Tester.

To download the product from IBM® Passport Advantage®, you must follow the instructions provided in the download document at Rational® Performance Tester V10.1.2.

For installation instructions, see Installation of the product by using Installation Manager.

Notes:
  • You can upgrade to V10.1.2 from V10.1.0 or V10.1.1 of the product.

  • If you have installed Rational® Performance Tester that is earlier than 10.1.0, you cannot upgrade the product to the latest version. You must uninstall the existing version of the product before you install the latest version of the product.

  • After you installed Rational® Performance Tester 10.1.2, at any point in time if you want to use earlier versions of the product, you cannot roll back to the previous version of the product. You must uninstall Rational® Performance Tester 10.1.2, and then install the required version of the product.

Known issues

You can find information about the known issues identified in this release of Rational® Performance Tester.
Table 1. Release documents - Fix list and known issues
Product Download document Knowledge Base

Rational® Performance Tester

Release document

Knowledge articles

Known problems are documented in the download document for each product and in the form of individual technotes in the Support Knowledge Base:

The knowledge base is continually updated as problems are discovered and resolved. By searching the knowledge base, you can quickly find workarounds or solutions to problems.

Contacting IBM Rational Software Support

You can find information about IBM technical support assistance for Rational® Performance Tester.

  • For contact information and guidelines or reference materials that you might need when you require support, read the IBM Support Guide.

  • For personalized support that includes notifications of significant upgrades, subscribe to Product notification.

  • Before you contact IBM Rational Software Support, you must gather the background information that you might need to describe your problem. When you describe a problem to an IBM software support specialist, be as specific as possible and include all relevant background information so that the specialist can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers to these questions:
    • What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
    • Do you have logs, traces, or messages that are related to the problem?
    • Can you reproduce the problem? If so, what steps do you take to reproduce it?
    • Is there a workaround for the problem? If so, be prepared to describe the workaround.