In the space of performance testing, designers have a range of tools at their disposal. Despite being first being introduced more than two decades ago, JMeter has retained a position of popularity. One reason this is true rests in the diverse extensibility of JMeter through the use of plugins. In this post, we will introduce the JMeter Plugins Manager and explain how you can easily add plugins to your test to best achieve your performance testing goals.
The JMeter Plugins Manager
As a pre-installed feature, the Plugins Manager provides a user interface for installing third-party community plugins to extend the core functionality of JMeter. You can access the Plugins Manager directly from the “Options” menu:
Opening the Plugins Manager will display both installed and available plugins from the community collection managed by jmeter-plugins.org. You can browse through a list of “Available Plugins”, as well as view “Installed Plugins” for your local environment:
Installing a plugin is a simple process. Just select one or more plugins from the available list on the left. Once applied, JMeter will automatically restart, and the newly installed plugins will be available to add to your test plan.
Plugins for JMeter Empower Your Tests
Plugins for JMeter extend base functionality and make JMeter more powerful and flexible for performance testing. They can provide extended features like custom thread modeling, result visualization, reporting, scripting, timers, and help with integration with other tools. In many cases, you can add a plugin for a certain behavior and be using it in your test within minutes. In another blog post we reviewed the top 10 JMeter plugins that are most frequently installed by users. These plugins are covered in more detail in that post, but a few examples include:
- Custom Thread Groups – An extremely popular package of JMeter plugins that includes the Ultimate Thread Group, the Concurrency Thread Group, the Stepping Thread Group, and the Throughput Shaping Timer components.
- Dummy Sampler – This plugin is useful for simulating responses within your tests and can help with designing and debugging complex test logic. Requests using this sampler do not generate actual web requests.
- Custom JMeter Functions – A package that introduces a useful collection of callable functions, which can be referenced from BeanShell or Groovy scripts.
In another post on our blog, we also reviewed some less common plugins that apply to several niche cases. You can browse the entire collection of available plugins on the jmeter-plugins.org website.
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