New “Builds” UX
Meet the new Blackfire user experience that will help you configure your automated performance tests!
By Christophe Dujarric, on Jul 15, 2016 You’re probably familiar now with the fact that Blackfire is a Performance Testing utility.
As such, performance tests are articulated around “builds“, which are the same concept than in Jenkins or Travis, for instance, without actually requiring to use one of those tools. Blackfire enables any developer to automate performance testing without any pre-requisites in terms of continuous integration/continuous deployment tool chain.
As we believe strongly that performance should be considered as a feature, we refined the testing capacities of Blackfire in the past months. And we naturally had to make it more intuitive and user-friendly in our user interface. As of today, there’s still a few small iterations remaining to fine-tune this whole new user experience, but we reached a stage where we felt confident enough to release. Meet the new Builds dashboard tab!
What’s new?
Strangely enough: nothing. We basically moved some UI elements from a page to an other, and tried to make it more intuitive for you to figure out the first steps into continuous performance testing, or Performance Driven Development, as some like to call it.
While creating a new Blackfire environment (available to Premium and Enterprise users only), you’ll be offered to configure your first periodic builds in 3 simple steps. You can safely ignore this step if you don’t have time to look into it: the new builds view will enable you to have the overview on your configuration and change any of its parameters at a click.
- Periodic builds provide a simple way to ask Blackfire to run profiles on a list of URLs of your app. If you defined no performance test, we’ll at least check for recommendations
- Tested URLs are a simple way to list the URLs you’d like Blackfire to run profiles on, without the burden of creating a .blackfire.yml file
- Notification channels enable you to define where Blackfire will send you build status and reports.
- Variables are an advanced feature enabling to use the same performance tests across different machines, and still taking in account their specificities which can especially impact time and memory metrics.
- Integrations (such as with New Relic, Platform.sh, Logmatic.io and Magento Cloud) and build API, last but not least offer a simple way to start Builds upon events happening in your app’s development, deployment or production life-cycle.
Play with the demo or subscribe now!
Having issues? Get in touch with our support team, and we’ll sort it out.
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Happy performance testing,
