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.

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. Rational® Performance Tester 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 Product overview.

What's new

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

  • Support for Jaeger traces view

    You can now use the Jaeger to view test logs of tests or schedules that you run from the command-line interface to analyze traces of transactions between distributed services. See Integration of Jaeger with the product.

  • A quick view in reports

    You can now add the additional counters on a separate page without editing an existing report to investigate performance issues in detail. See Adding additional counters on a separate page.

  • Updates to Dataset CSV Editor

    The browser-based CSV Editor provides additional options that include Find and Replace, Undo, and Redo to organize your data in the dataset in a better way. See Editing datasets.

  • Labels for Resource Monitoring sources

    In Rational® Performance Tester, you can now select the data sources in a schedule based on the labels that you added for the data sources in Rational® Test Automation Server. See Enablement of Resource Monitoring services for a schedule.

  • Environment variables for Jenkins

    You can now set environment variables on the Jenkins server as inputs to the text fields that are available for Rational® Performance Tester test in a Jenkins build step. See Testing with Jenkins.

  • Enhancements to Microsoft Azure DevOps integration

    You can now integrate Rational® Performance Tester with Azure DevOps to run tests as tasks in Azure DevOps pipelines by using the IBM Rational Test Workbench extension that is available in the Visual Studio Marketplace portal. See Integration with Azure DevOps.

  • Enhancement to performance reports

    • The Overall page of the performance report is updated to show the Page VPs, Page Element VPs, Page Status Codes, Page Element Status Codes, and Page Health information in an individual chart and the information about the overall verification point in a pie chart. See Overall page.

    • The Resources page of the performance report is updated to show the resource counters information in front of their Resource Monitoring source name. The Performance Summary table now shows the Type of the source and Name of the resource counter in two different columns. See Resources page.

    • You can now view and monitor the counter information generated by the custom code on a graph when the custom code starts in the test run. See Adding custom counters to reports.

  • Enhancements to SAP GUI

    Most of the steps are automated now when you record SAP tests by using an SAP batch input test recording wizard. See Recording a SAP batch input test.

  • Properties Verification Points in Service Test

    You can now add verification points for the properties in a test response when you record a service test or after you record the service test. See Adding properties verification points to a test response.

  • Support for Text message in WebSphere MQ protocol configuration

    After you create a WebSphere MQ protocol configuration, now you can change the message format by selecting the Text Message check box in the Message Structure. See Creating a WebSphere MQ protocol configuration.

System requirements

You can find information about the hardware and software compatibility required for Rational® Performance Tester.

For information about hardware and software compatibility, go to the Software Product Compatibility Reports site and complete the on-screen instructions to generate the detailed system requirements document for your product.

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 directions in the download document at Rational® Performance Tester V10.1.0.

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

Notes:
  • You cannot upgrade to the latest version of the product. You must uninstall the existing version of the product before installing the latest version of the product.

  • After installing V10.1.0, at any point of time if you want to use the previous version of the product, you cannot roll back to the previous version. If you want to use the previous version of the product, you must uninstall the existing version, 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.

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 will need when you require support, read the IBM Support Guide.

  • For personalized support, including notifications of significant upgrades, subscribe at Product notification.

  • Before you contact IBM Rational Software Support, gather the background information that you will need to describe your problem. When describing 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.