General Administration Guide

First Access

Depending on how you have configured Tomcat, you may use a different URL to access the main page of nGrinder. If you didn’t change ${TOMCAT_HOME}/conf/server.xml and didn’t locate nGrinder controller war file as ROOT.war, nGrinder should have the following URL.

Once you access the URL, you can see the login page.

Login with Default Account

When you start nGrinder for the first time, the DB should have 4 users.

The predefined IDs are as follows. Each has name that reflects its role.

• admin, user, superuser, system
• Initial password is the same as name

There are 4 user types (referred to as Roles)

To configure the system, you need to log in with an admin account.

NOTE:  Please don’t forget to change your password when you log in for the first time. If you leave your account set to the default password, your nGrinder instance can be used by a hacker for a DDOS attack.

Manage Agents

Agent management in the admin menu offers agent operation and monitoring functions. Even when you have configured the agent to connect the controller, you need to approve each agent in the controller to make it effective. This step is required to prevent abnormal agents trying to connect to the controller from abusing the controller.

If you are admin, the menu above should be visible. You can click the Agent Management menu to manage agents. 

Then, you should see the screen shown above. This shows the statuses of the attached agent. If we just allow all agent connections, there is the potential for abuse. For this reason, we provide a limitation that only allows approved agents to be used for each test. If you confirm that the agents listed here are OK, you can approve them. Some agents can be only used for specific users. Please refer to User Specific Agent for details.

By clicking each IP, you can monitor agent performance status. It’s important to monitor the CPU/MEM usage of each agent, as some agents may not create sufficient loads.

This graph shows the performance of each agent in the last 1 minute.

User Management

Admin can create/delete and modify users through the user management menu. Each user can also modify his/her own profile.

Script Console

This is a useful admin tool for debugging. Admin can input some jython code allow it to be executed on the server, and display the result, for example:

print agentManager.getAllAttachedAgents()

But it is important to, know what you can execute. The following variables are available.

• applicationContext (org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext)
• agentManager (org.ngrinder.perftest.service.AgentManager)
• consoleManager (org.ngrinder.perftest.service.ConsoleManager)
• userService (org.ngrinder.user.service.UserService)
• perfTestService (org.ngrinder.perftest.service.PerfTestService)
• fileEntryService (org.ngrinder.script.service.FileEntryService)
• config (org.ngrinder.infra.config.Config)
• pluginManager (org.ngrinder.infra.plugin.PluginManager)

Please refer to the nGrinder javadoc to learn the available classes and methods.

Log monitoring

Sometime it’s important to see the server log to identify a problem and send a bug reports to the developers.

Instead of catalina.out which tomcat uses by default, nGrinder intercepts the logging system and writes a log in the ${NGRINDER_HOME}/logs/ngrinder.log file.

You can see the currently printing logs in the Log Monitoring menu. This is refreshed every 5 seconds in order to show the latest available logs.

Test Policies

Sometimes, you need to configure the limitation for each test. For example, you can set the maximum count of agents that each test can use. Or you can limit the max concurrent number of tests to minimize network loads. These kinds of policies can be configured by configuring the ${NGRINDER_HOME}/system.properties file.

For further details, please refer Advanced Controller Configuration.