Setting up Flood Agent with Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean account access
Apache JMeter 5.1.1
Java 1.8
Digital Ocean comes with a large range of Droplet sizes available. Choosing the right one to service the amount of concurrency you wish to generate takes a little planning and some 'trial and error'.
Typically load generators (using tools such as JMeter) are primarily memory-bound, followed closely by CPU. It also highly depends on what your virtual users are doing within your script so having ample amounts of both will definitely help accomodate user concurrency in your load test.
For the purposes of this guide - we'll only be looking at a fairly mid-spec'd Droplet however the installation steps no matter what Droplet size you choose will be practically identical.
Digital Ocean support a bunch of Linux distributions - we'll go ahead and choose Ubuntu 18.04 for general ease of use in this guide.
As previously mentioned we'll choose one of the new Memory-Optimized Droplets being offered.
It is fairly important to choose the region based on where your users will realistically be originating from for your production environment. Having a load generator node in a different region will impact latency when it's time to run your test which will most likely translate to higher-than-expected user response times.
For this guide we'll choose the New York datacenter.
We'll also go ahead and select the Monitoring additional option so we can keep an eye on the resource utilization when we are running a load test with this Droplet.
In this configuration section, we'll go ahead and choose to use the One-time password (strictly for the purposes of this guide).
It is highly recommended to use SSH keys as it is a more secure method for accessing your Droplet.
Once you are happy with the aforementioned options - go ahead and Create the Droplet and wait until it is available.
Once you have been able to access your new Droplet - it's important to do some initial housekeeping tasks before we get underway in installing the Flood Agent.
Makes sure your droplet has the latest apt-get install packages. Type the following to do this:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Now we'll need to download the latest Flood Agent release from this page: https://github.com/flood-io/flood-agent/releases​
But firstly, we'll create a flood-agent directory to put all of our related files in.
mkdir ~/flood-agent
cd flood-agent
Download the latest Flood Agent build using wget
wget https://github.com/flood-io/flood-agent/releases/download/v1.0-beta.9/flood-agent-linux-1.0-beta.9
mv flood-agent-linux-1.0-beta.9 flood-agent
chmod 0755 flood-agent
Now you have the Flood Agent setup on your new Droplet!
Since we want to use Apache JMeter with this Flood Agent installation - we'll need to first install Java which is required for JMeter to run.
You can easily do this by running sudo apt install default-jre
Once installed check that it is available by running java -version which should report back the Java version that just got installed.
Now for JMeter, we want to install the latest version as of this guide (5.2) - that can be downloaded from here: https://jmeter.apache.org/download_jmeter.cgi​
We can download this tool in the root user home directory as a new directory will be created once the download archive is extracted.
cd ~
wget http://apache.mirror.digitalpacific.com.au//jmeter/binaries/apache-jmeter-5.2.zip
apt install unzip
unzip apache-jmeter-5.2.zip
rm -rf apache-jmeter-5.2.zip
We now have a fresh JMeter install in the root home directory at ~/apache-jmeter-5.2
In order for JMeter to work successfully with Flood Agent we'll need to put two Flood Agent related plugins into the lib/ext folder within the JMeter installation directory.
cd ~/apache-jmeter-5.2/lib/ext/
wget https://github.com/flood-io/flood-agent/releases/download/v1.0-beta.9/flood-jmeter-5.1.1.jar
wget https://github.com/flood-io/flood-agent/releases/download/v1.0-beta.9/json-simple-1.1.1.jar
Once this has been done we can go back to the Flood Agent directory and finalize our installation.
We've built the configure command that lets you create a config.yaml file via the CLI instead of creating one in a text editor.
You will need your Flood API key which is available when you login to the Flood web application, select API Access from the user menu.
Copy the API token flood_live_123xxxxxxxxxxx and run cd ~/flood-agent
To start the configure wizard - type ./flood-agent configure
Enter the API token when it asks for you to do so.
The next step is to specify where our new Apache JMeter installation lives.
Enter the path when asked to ~/apache-jmeter-5.2
You can say No to setting up other tools such as Gatling for this example. Select Yes when asked to write the new configuration file.
Once your config.yaml file and JMeter tool are setup - we can now go ahead and run the agent itself.
cd ~/flood-agent
./flood-agent to run the agent on your new load generator node.
You should see something similar to the following output:
If you see something similar - Congratulations! you are now ready to run a JMeter load test using this load generator.
Once logging in back to the Flood web application - you should see your new load generator node visible in the Grids page as follows:
When setting up a new load test - you will have the ability to select this Grid to run your tests with.
