Tag Archives: performance testing
Setting Up a JMeter Instance on the Cloud to Inject Load Against Microsoft SQL Azure
So, you want to set-up load injection capabilities on the Amazon EC2 cloud to throw load against a Microsoft SQL Azure database?
This quick tutorial will show you how to do the following:
- Setting up Apache JMeter (version 2.4 as of this post) on the Amazon EC2 Cloud
- Setting up appropriate JDBC drivers
- Setting the correct connection attributes to be able to successfully connect to the Microsoft SQL Azure database
Setting up Apache JMeter on an Amazon EC2 instance
The following instructions should work on any EC2 instance. I used a standard Server 2008 R2 x64 AMI.
Setting JMeter Timestamp to Human Readable Format in Logs
The default timestamp format in JMeter csv logs is given in a Unix style format.
For some (including my colleagues and I), this simply introduces an unnecessary delay to the analysis process of performance tests. Granted it is pretty straightforward converting the format from Unix time to human time with the help of the Excel ‘HOUR’ function, but when you are analysing many tests, it becomes slightly repetitive and cumbersome when you have an option in JMeter to switch to a more human readable format 
This quick tutorial will show you how to ‘turn on’ the option for JMeter to print out timestamps in human readable formats:
