Home
Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests in Rational® Test Automation Server. You can find information about configuring runs for the different test types that are supported. You can also find information about other tasks that you can perform on the Resource Monitoring Service, Virtualization, and Integrations with third-party applications. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
Resource monitoring
When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. Resource monitoring in Rational® Test Automation Server helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics and usage data of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.
Collecting and viewing resource monitoring usage data
With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can collect resource monitoring data in a timeframe and view the resource monitoring usage data in a graph while the test is running. You can also create queries to retrieve the resource monitoring usage data.
Configuring a test
You must configure a test with two parameters to collect resource monitoring usage data in a timeframe when the test is running.

Test Execution Specialist Guide
This guide describes tasks that you must complete before you can configure and run tests in Rational® Test Automation Server. You can find information about configuring runs for the different test types that are supported. You can also find information about other tasks that you can perform on the Resource Monitoring Service, Virtualization, and Integrations with third-party applications. This guide is intended for testers or test execution specialists.
- System modeling
  In this topic, you can find information about using the system model feature. You can also find the tasks that you can perform to create a system model. You must configure a repository to save the system model that you created for the application under test.
- Prerequisites to running tests
  Before you can run a test asset in a project on Rational® Test Automation Server, you must read the information about the different tests assets. You can add a remote static agent or Docker host to the project and then select it as an alternate location to run the test assets.
- Management of agents
  You can find information about managing performance agents that you install on remote computers and then configure the remote agents to register with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. After the agents are registered, you can add them to your projects and then select them as locations to run tests.
- Management of Docker hosts
  You can find information about the tasks that you can perform on remote Docker hosts. After you set up a remote Docker host, you can register the Docker host with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. You must then add the registered remote Docker host to your project before you can run tests on the remote Docker host location.
- Management of remote Kubernetes clusters
  You can find information about the tasks that you can perform on remote Kubernetes clusters. After you set up a remote Kubernetes cluster, you can register the external cluster with a team space on IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server. You must then add the remote cluster to a project before you run test assets or resources on the remote Kubernetes cluster.
- Test run configurations
  You can configure and run tests in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server after you add the test resources to your project in your team space.
- Configuration of a scan of an application code
  You can use Rational® Test Automation Server to scan your application code for security vulnerabilities similar to using the HCL AppScan CodeSweep plugin to scan code in Visual Studio.
- Management of running tests
  Find information about the tasks that you can perform on a test that you configured for a run either while it runs or after it completes the run.
- Management of virtualized services
  You can find information about the tasks that you can perform on and manage the virtualized services that run on Rational® Test Automation Server. You can start or stop the virtual services that are connected to Rational Test Automation Server. You can view the routing rules and usage statistics of virtualized services, agents, or intercepts that are connected to Rational Test Automation Server.
- Test results
  After the tests, Suites, or schedules are run and completed, you can view the results and open the reports in IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to analyze the verdict, the performance, and statistics. You can also re-execute tests and schedules from the Result page with the same commit id.
- Resource monitoring
  When you apply load to a system under test, the amount of resources consumed by your system is increasing. If the capacity of the resources does not match the load, you can see performance issues in the results. Resource monitoring in Rational® Test Automation Server helps you monitoring the resources of a system and establish the performance metrics and usage data of the system. Thus, you can observe the health of these resources while a schedule is running.
  - Resource monitoring capabilities
    With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can monitor a host or a service that you add to a project as a source. You can select the statistics counters that are used to collect metrics and the resource usage data throughout the monitoring system. You can visualize metrics and data that are gathered during the monitoring process in Rational Test Automation Server.
  - Resource monitoring agents
    You can connect agents to IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server from other hosts to monitor a larger set of data collectors, computers, servers, or systems, or if a server to monitor requires authorization access. To monitor these remote servers, you must configure and run the agents so that a connection is set between IBM Rational Test Automation Server resource monitoring service and the agents.
  - Managing sources
    After you add and connect monitoring sources to your project, you might want to modify the sources in you project and the configuration of the sources.
  - Collecting and viewing resource monitoring usage data
    With Rational® Test Automation Server, you can collect resource monitoring data in a timeframe and view the resource monitoring usage data in a graph while the test is running. You can also create queries to retrieve the resource monitoring usage data.
    - Configuring a test
      You must configure a test with two parameters to collect resource monitoring usage data in a timeframe when the test is running.
    - Viewing resource monitoring usage data
      After you add and configure monitoring sources in Rational® Test Automation Server, you can view the resource monitoring usage data in a graph for each monitored source and for each selected counter.
    - Creating queries for resource monitoring usage data
      After you execute a test to collect resource monitoring usage data, you can create queries to retrieve the data.
- Configuration of a change management system
  When you use any application to create and track defects (bugs), issues, or other work items, you can configure the application as a change management system on Rational® Test Automation Server. You can then create defects (bugs), issues, or other work items without the need to open your application.
- Integrations with other applications
  You can integrate certain applications with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server to run tests, view the test results, and create defects.
- Managing access to the server
  Desktop clients and third-party integrations use offline user tokens to connect to Rational® Test Automation Server.
- Working with IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server REST services
  When you want to use the IBM® Rational® Test Automation Server REST APIs in your test automation scripts, you can view the REST APIs that are exposed by IBM Rational Test Automation Server. You can also run the APIs from within your project in IBM Rational Test Automation Server.

Configuring a test

You must configure a test with two parameters to collect resource monitoring usage data in a timeframe when the test is running.

Before you begin

You must have completed the following tasks:

Added and configured a source.
Created resource monitoring labels for your source.

About this task

You can collect resource monitoring usage data during a test run for all types of monitoring sources, and all test types, except API stubs.

Procedure

Click Execution, In the navigation pane.
Select the test that you want to run and click in the Actions column to open the Execute test asset window.
Click Advanced settings.

Enter the following parameters and values in Additional Configuration Parameters:

Parameter name

Value

rm.log.labels

Enter a label name in the second edit field as the parameter value.

If you enter multiple labels, enter a comma to separate them in the list.

Example: For two labels with the following names: 'LabelA' and 'LabelB':

rm.log.labels LabelA,LabelB

If a label contains a comma in its name, you must add two commas in order to collect the resource monitoring usage data.

Example: For a label named ‘Label1A,Label1B’, enter the following parameter and value:

rm.log.labels Label1A,,Label1B

rm.log.period.seconds

Enter a sampling period in the second edit field as the parameter value. The minimum period is one second.

Click Add for each parameter.
Click Execute.

Results

The monitoring data is collected while your test is running. You can see the collected data in a graph of the resource monitoring page, even 3 minutes after the test is complete.

What to do next

You can view the resource usage data on the resource monitoring page. See Viewing resource monitoring usage data.