Creating dsTest Measurements

In the Working with OMs topic we discussed the different types of measurements that dsTest automatically generates during your test and how to interpret measurement values. When you include SmartEvents in your test you can generate custom measurements by defining counter operations in your event handlers. The measurements you create will be included with the dynamic measurements that dsTest generates based on your state machine configuration.

Creating Simple Counters

The Increment User Counter and Decrement User Counter elements cause the measurement you identify in the element's value to either be incremented or decremented. These measurements will accumulate values through the life of your test. dsTest will dynamically generate an OM for each of your event handlers that will be incremented whenever it is executed.

Creating Duration Measurements

dsTest provides application transaction duration measurements, but transaction duration does not measure the duration of a multi-transaction procedure or the amount of time a session was active. You can implement those types of measurements with the Mark/Accumulate feature. When dsTest processes a Mark Start Time element in an event handler it starts a microsecond timer that runs until dsTest encounters an Accumulate Duration element that references the same measurement name.

dsTest will generate a set of duration OMs along with an event accumulator OM that tracks the number of times the duration was measured. The generated measurement names will follow a naming convention:

<om_name> Occurrences is the EVENT ACCUMULATOR that reports the number of times your timer was activated over the lifetime of your test.

<om_name> is the DURATION ACCUMULATOR and in each interval it reports the microseconds that were accumulated during that interval. Divide by the EVENT ACCUMULATOR's interval value (the current interval's value minus the previous interval's value) to obtain the average duration for the current interval.

<om_name> Minimum and <om_name> Maximum are the DURATION MINIMUM and DURATION MAXIMUM measurements respectively.

<om_name> Variance is the VARIANCE ACCUMULATOR measurement that accumulates the cumulative square of the difference of each duration that expires in this interval from the mean.

These measurements can be included in dsClient Desktop chart or tabular reports, as with any dynamic OM generated by dsTest, and the report will calculate the final values based on the OM type.

You can see this feature in action in the example test configuration example_app_gx_Mark-Accumulate-pcef.