Using Maven Chronos Without an External JMeter Install

Performance is one of the things we're really focused on at Kikini. But we want to stay focused on actually improving performance, and not spending a lot of cycles making manual measurements and interpreting logs. JMeter is probably the best open-source tool out there for measuring performance of a web application. I designed a JMeter test plan to simulate users visiting our site. Unfortunately while JMeter is great at making measurements, it stops short of data analysis and reporting.

Ideally we would like to get perf reports out of every build, which means we would like to do reporting as part of our Maven build, with results available as easily readable charts on our build server. The top hit you're likely to get from searching for "maven jmeter" is the awful JMeterMavenPlugin. I say awful because it wasn't easy to integrate, and if you look at the source code it's obvious that the project was done in spare time. There are a number of comments in the source like "this mess is necessary because..." which makes me think the whole thing is poorly designed, and if you search around you will indeed find that there are a number of problems people have encountered trying to use it. Finally, the output from the plugin is just the simple JMeter log, and not the reports I'd like.

All the way down in the middle of the second page of the Google results I found this gem: chronos-maven-plugin. Not only does this look like a well-designed and well-executed project, it produces wonderful HTML reports, perfect for plugging into our build server! This is a snippet of what the Chronos output looks like:



The only downside is that the Chronos plugin requires an external install of JMeter, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of Maven. Fortunately, inspired by an Atlassian post, I worked out a way to use the Chronos plugin without making JMeter a manual install by using the maven-dependency-plugin. First I deployed the JMeter ZIP file as an artifact on our Artifcatory repository:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>org.apache.jmeter</groupId>
  <artifactId>jmeter</artifactId>
  <version>2.3.4</version>
  <packaging>zip</packaging>
  <description>Artifactory auto generated POM</description>
</project>

In my POM, I set jmeter.home to the location that we'll be unpacking JMeter into:

<properties>
  <jmeter-version>2.3.4</jmeter-version>
  <jmeter.home>${project.build.directory}/jakarta-jmeter-${jmeter-version}</jmeter.home>
</properties>

Next I use the dependency plugin in the pre-integration-test step to unpack JMeter into the target folder:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.1</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>unpack-jmeter</id>
      <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>unpack</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <artifactItems>
          <artifactItem>
            <groupId>org.apache.jmeter</groupId>
            <artifactId>jmeter</artifactId>
            <version>${jmeter-version}</version>
            <type>zip</type>
          </artifactItem>
        </artifactItems>
        <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}</outputDirectory>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Finally I configure Chronos to run:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>chronos-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <configuration>
    <input>${basedir}/src/test/jmeter/UserSession.jmx</input>
  </configuration>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals>
        <goal>jmeter</goal>
        <goal>savehistory</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Bingo. Now anyone running our build can get the JMeter performance reports with nothing more complex than running "mvn verify chronos:report".