jenkins

Logstash filter for Robot Framework

/ jankka / Leave a comment

We are currently working on CI/CD -setup at work. As part of that, the tests need to be able to be implemented as a part of the pipeline.
Generally, the pipeline consists of steps/stages done with jenkins pipeline. The benefit on this is that the whole process and definition of the stages (Deploy, test etc) will be done by the developer team and stored in the teams own repository and is therefore controlled by the team also. Which is definitely a great step towards for the teams having more freedom and more responsibility when it comes to deliver the applications/solutions to the production. Needless to say it will also affect to the visibility of the quality and to the need of tests.

Plus that it will definitely keep the test team on their toes. Keeping ahead becomes a really neat challenge 😀

Now that does add more requirements also on the testing tools. First of all, the tools we use should be able to be used from containers. Which means that everything is dockerized. Well, the test code itself is in the repository, but the engines running the tests are in the containers.
We use, whenever we can, a general docker images from dockerhub.
Sometimes it won’t work like that. So we end up re-inventing the wheel.

That was the case with logstash. We will need to be able to filter the Robot Framework’s output.xml and send it to elasticsearch. There was two possibilities to do that; logstash filtering or xml parsing. The xml-parsing remains to be done still (I am going to do it), but I did manage to create the logstash -filter. It is not completely flawless, not even the most elegant, but at the moment it seems to be working as it should. To be honest, I was aiming to have a one more blunt instrument for our test needs.

The filter:

robot-results.conf

input {
 file {
 path => [ "/output.xml"]
 }
}

filter {
 xml
 {
 source => "message"
 store_xml => true
 target => "doc"
 xpath =>
 [

"msg", "doc.msg",
 "arguments", "doc.args",
 "kw", "doc.keyword",
 "status", "doc.status",
 "status/@status", "doc.test.status",
 "robot", "doc.robot",
 "errors", "doc.errors",
 "statistics", "doc.statistics",
 "suite", "doc.suite",
 "tag", "doc.tag",
 "total", "doc.total",
 "/kw", "leftovers",
 "/arguments", "leftovers"

]



}
}



output {
 elasticsearch {
 hosts => ["elastic"]
 index => "logstash-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"
 }
}

Dockerfile:

FROM logstash

ADD robot-results.conf /etc/logstash/conf.d/robot/results.conf
CMD logstash -f /etc/logstash/conf.d/robot/

Running the container:

docker run --add-host=elastic:127.0.0.1 janmat/logstash-robot

 

Advertisement

Features of a (good) test environment

/ jankka / Leave a comment

Easy to deliver

The test environment should be able to be delivered by request with as little input as humanly possible. A click of a button, a SMS sent, a commit to VCS should be able to act as a trigger.

Steady

The test environment should be as stead and as reliable as possible so that we can rely on that the failing tests are not caused by faults in the test environment

Open Source

I do see that the benefits of open source tools and projects are way more beneficiary than what you get from plain commercial tools. Even though you might end up paying for the support and building in the knowledge, it still pays off in the end.

Easy to Set-up

The test environment should be able to be set up by just pressing a button. If external information is needed a set of variables should be able to entered automatically.

Easy to Reset

You should be able to reset the test environment to a desired level of functionality at any point of time in order to re-execute the failed tests. Furthermore, it would be great to have a possibility to automatically run deeper analytical tests automatically in case of failure.

Easy to Monitor

Test environment should provide an interface where you can easily see the status of the tests, historical metrics and also the status of the test environment.

Provides test data

Test environment should contain test data generator which could by request fill in the databases with relevant test data. It should contain a simple interface in order to receive and response with the requested test data. The test data generator should not affect to the performance of the actually tested item.

Provides test results and metrics

Test environment should be able to provide the status of itself. And since it consists of the whole system plus the underlying parts, it should be able to deliver the status as effortless to the users and stackholders as possible.

You could, for example have a status interface. An interface that provides the status of the test environment in a single view.

There should be an interface – a web interface would nowadays be enough – that gives you all the relevant information about the tested items. And all this in a glimpse.

For the event monitoring, you could use ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana).

For the test monitoring, you could use the wall display on Jenkins. That at least shows the status of the executed tests. What I am missing from there is the status of individual test cases instead. One way to get them would be to build the tests in Jenkins per test case and add separate views per test suite.

But even that would tell the status only per test suite. What if you had several test suites in the project and 4/5 of them would be executed, 1/5 would be skipped and 10% of the executed test cases would have failed. How to display that?

Above those you would need to have to know the other metrics; load test results, combined result of different test suites, status of the all available test suites and test cases combined with the execution of the test cases today. The list seems to be endless here.

And all in a single look.

Or would it be enough to just have one page that indicates the status of the test environment together with the status of the test results. With two different indicators.

But what should the indicators then be? Traffic lights? Metrics? Curves? Flowcharts? Or combination of them?

What I’d like to know here is if there already exists such a system, or should I start to create that myself? Not that I haven’t been reinventing the wheel before (trust me, I have created my share of 3-sided ones), but it might help if I’d knew I wouldn’t have to.