Understanding errors in your floods

How to understand where to get further information about errors and failed transactions observed in your testing.

It is almost a certainty that you will encounter errors or failed transactions in at least 1 or more of your load tests potentially due to a myriad of reasons-- and this is perfectly normal. How do we go about understanding these errors using Flood?

Using Flood, there are 4 main areas that will help in getting further information about errors and/or failed transactions:

• Failed transactions rate

• The Flood execution logs

• Transaction-based drill down error information

• Raw CSV results

Failed transactions rate

In the project view, you can find the failed rate for a particular flood.

This aggregate summary will update every 15 seconds during test execution and will give you the total rate of failed transactions across all transaction labels. This is a great way to quickly keep an eye on failed transactions as they happen.

pageProject view

The Flood execution logs

Execution logs are provided for every flood in the flood view and show detail about Grid & node initialization, scenario metrics, and most importantly and errors or exceptions generated by the tool being used for the test.

It's always important to monitor these logs as you can still see a relatively clean test with regards to the number of passed transactions, -but the logs may tell a completely different story.

The errors are grouped for readability so that there aren't thousands of messages that you need to sort through to find an issue.

Date and timestamps are also provided so that you are able to investigate what was happening if there are any response time spikes or other events that were observed during the test. Often a response time spike or a throughput dip can be correlated with log events happening at the same time.

pageFlood view

Transaction-based drill down error information

Every single transaction label has a drill-down results sub-section that enables you to look at the type of errors (if any) being observed.

You are able to access this transaction detail view by clicking on the respective arrow icon for the transaction you are interested in analysing further.

In the example below, you can see that both transaction labels have a high error rate. Selecting one of them will enable you to understand what type of error it is, and more importantly, what the actual error is.

Once clicking on the arrow icon, you will be presented with a page similar to the one below:

Check out the Transaction detail view section for more information.

pageTransaction detail view

Raw Archived Results

Every Flood load injection node has an archived set of results that contains essentially all test artefacts used for a Flood. Amongst these test artefacts is the full raw data of every request placed in the test.

Opening the results.csv file, for example, shows every single request and response as well as other helpful metrics. Using filters in Microsoft Excel can help you narrow down and group requests that returned a 404 error for example:​

If the error was a non-HTTP error, the error message is recorded within the failureMessage column for your reference.

pageArchived Results