Understand your Test Results

During the Pipeline execution, a number of metrics are captured and compared to either the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) defined by the business owner, or standards set by Adobe Managed Services.

These are reported using the three-tier gating system as defined in this section.

Three-Tier Gates while Running a Pipeline

There are three gates in the pipeline:

• Code Quality
• Performance Testing
• Security Testing

For each of these gates, there is a three-tier structure for issues identified by the gate.

• Critical - These are issues identified by the gate which cause an immediate failure of the pipeline.
• Important - These are issues identified by the gate which cause the pipeline to enter a paused state. A deployment manager, project manager, or business owner can either override the issues, in which case the pipeline proceeds, or they can accept the issues, in which case the pipeline stops with a failure. Override of important failures are subject to a Timeout.
• Info - These are issues identified by the gate which are provided purely for informational purposes and have no impact on the pipeline execution.

Code Quality Testing

This step evaluates the quality of your application code. It is the core objective of a Code-Quality only pipeline and is executed immediately following the build step in all non-production and production pipelines. Refer to Configuring your CI-CD Pipeline to learn more about different types of pipelines.

Understanding Code Quality Testing

In Code Quality Testing, the source code is scanned to ensure that it meets certain quality criteria. Currently, this is implemented by a combination of SonarQube, content package-level examination using OakPAL, and dispatcher validation using the Dispatcher Optimization Tool. There are over 100 rules combining generic Java rules and AEM-specific rules. Some of the AEM-specific rules are created based on best practices from AEM Engineering and are referred to as Custom Code Quality Rules.

The results of this step is delivered as Rating. The table below summarizes the ratings for various test criteria:

Dealing with False Positives

The quality scanning process is not perfect and will sometimes incorrectly identify issues which are not actually problematic. This is referred to as a “false positive”.

In these cases, the source code can be annotated with the standard Java @SuppressWarnings annotation specifying the rule ID as the annotation attribute. For example, one common problem is that the SonarQube rule to detect hardcoded passwords can be aggressive about how a hardcoded password is identified.

To look at a specific example, this code would be fairly common in an AEM project which has code to connect to some external service:

@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

SonarQube will then raise a Blocker Vulnerability. After reviewing the code, you identify that this is not a vulnerability and can annotate this with the appropriate rule id.

@SuppressWarnings("squid:S2068")
@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

However, on the other hand, if the code was actually this:

@Property(label = "Service Password", value = "mysecretpassword")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

Then the correct solution is to remove the hardcoded password.

Security Testing

Cloud Manager runs the existing AEM Security Heath Checks on stage following the deployment and reports the status through the UI. The results are aggregated from all AEM instances in the environment.

These same Health Checks can be executed at any time through the Web Console or the Operations Dashboard.

If any of the Instances report a failure for a given health check, the entire Environment fails that health check. As with Code Quality and Performance Testing, these health checks are organized into categories and reported using the three-tier gating system. The only distinction is that there is no threshold in the case of security testing. All the health checks are simply pass or fail.

The following table lists the current checks:

Performance Testing

AEM Sites

Cloud Manager executes performance testing for AEM Sites programs. The performance test is run for ~ 30 mins by spinning up virtual users (containers) that simulate actual users to access pages on Stage environment and simulate traffic. These pages are found using a crawler.

1. Virtual Users

   The number of virtual users or containers that are spun up by Cloud Manager are driven by the KPI’s (response time and pageviews/min) defined by the user in the Business Owner role while creating or editing the program. Based on KPIs defined, up to 10 containers that simulate actual users will be spun up. The pages that are selected for testing are split and assigned to each virtual.

2. Crawler

   Prior to the start of the 30 minute test period, Cloud Manager will crawl the Stage environment using a set of one or more seed URLs configured by the Customer Success Engineer. Starting from these URLs, the HTML of each page is inspected and links are traversed in a breadth-first fashion. This crawling process is limited to a maximum of 5000 pages. Requests from the crawler have a fixed timeout of 10 seconds.

3. Page Sets for Testing

   Pages are selected by three page sets. Cloud Manager uses the access logs from the AEM instances across Production and Stage to determine the following three buckets:

   • Popular Live Pages: This option is selected to make sure that the most popular pages accessed by live customers are tested. Cloud Manager will read the access log and determine the top 25 most-accessed pages by live customers to generate a list of top Popular Live Pages. The intersection of these that are also present in Stage are then crawled on Stage environment.

   • Other Live Pages: This option is selected to make sure that the pages that fall outside the top 25 popular live pages that may not be popular, but important to test are tested. Similar to Popular live pages, these are extracted from the access log and must also be present on Stage.

   • New Pages: This option is selected to test new pages that may have only been deployed to Stage and not yet to Production, but are must be tested.

     Distribution of traffic across page sets selected

     You can choose anywhere from one to all three sets in the ‘Testing’ tab of your pipeline configuration (Insert link). The distribution of traffic is based on the number of sets selected, that is, if all three are selected, 33% of the total page views are put toward each set; if two are selected, 50% goes to each set; if one is selected, 100% of the traffic goes to that set.

     For example, let us say that there is a 50% - 50% split between the Popular Live Pages and New Pages set (in this example, Other Live Pages is not used) and the New Pages set contains 3000 pages. The page views per minute KPI is set to 200. Over the 30 minute test period:

     • Each of the 25 pages in the Popular Live Pages set will be hit 120 times – ((200 * 0.5) / 25) * 30 = 120

     • Each of the 3000 pages in the New Pages set will be hit once - ((200 * 0.5) / 3000) * 30 = 1

Testing and Reporting

Cloud Manager executes performance testing for AEM Sites programs by requesting pages (as an unauthenticated user by default) on the stage publish server for a 30 minute test period and measuring the (virtual) user-generated metrics (response time, error rate, views per minute, etc.) for each page as well as various system-level metrics (CPU, memory, networking data) for all instances.
The following table summarizes the performance test metrics vis-a-vis using the three-tier gating system:

The following table summarizes the performance test matrix using the three-tier gating system:

Refer to the section below, Authenticated Performance Testing for more details on using basic authentication for performance testing for Sites and Assets.

Authenticated Performance Testing

This feature is Sites optional.
AMS customers with authenticated sites can specify a username and password which Cloud Manager will use to access the website during Sites Performance Testing.
The username and password are specified as Pipeline Variables with the names CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_USERNAME and CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_PASSWORD.
Although not strictly required, it is recommended to use the string variable type for the username and the secretString variable type for the password. If both of these are specified, every request from the performance test crawler and the test virtual users will contain these credentials as HTTP Basic authentication.

To set these variables using the Cloud Manager CLI, run:

$ aio cloudmanager:set-pipeline-variables <pipeline id> --variable CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_USERNAME <username> --secret CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_PASSWORD <password>

Refer to Variables to learn how to use the API.

AEM Assets

Cloud Manager executes performance testing for AEM Assets programs by uploading assets repeatedly for a 30 minute test period.

1. Onboarding Requirement

   For Assets performance testing, your Customer Success Engineer will create a cloudmanager user (and password) during the onboarding of the Author to Stage environment. The performance test steps will need the user called cloudmanager and the associated password set up by your CSE. This should neither be removed from the Author nor changed wrt to permissions. Doing so will likely fail the Assets performance testing.

2. Images and Assets for Testing

   Customers can upload their own assets for testing. This can be done from the Pipeline Setup or Edit screen. Common image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP are supported along with Photoshop, Illustrator and Postscript files. However, if no images are uploaded, Cloud Manager will use a default image and PDF document for testing.

3. Distribution of Assets for Testing

   The distribution of how many assets of each type are uploaded per minute is set in the Pipeline Setup or Edit screen.
   For example, if a 70/30 split is used, as seen in the figure below. There are 10 assets uploaded per minute, 7 images will be uploaded per minute and 3 documents.

4. Testing and Reporting

   Cloud Manager will create a folder on Author instance, using the username and password setup by the CSE from step #1 (Onboarding Requirements) as mentioned above and upload assets in the folder using a library that is open source. The tests run by the Assets testing step are written using this open source library. Both processing time for each asset as well as various system-level metrics are measured across the 30-minute testing duration. This capability can upload both images and PDF documents.

   NOTE

   You can learn more about configuring performance testing, from Configure your CI/CD Pipeline. Refer to Setup your Program to learn how to setup your program and define your KPIs.

Performance Testing Results Graphs

New graphs and download options have been added to the Performance Test Results dialog.

When you open the Performance Test dialog, the metric panels can be expanded to display a graph, provide a link to a download, or both.

For Cloud Manager Release 2018.7.0, this functionality is available for the following metrics:

• CPU Utilization

  • A graph of CPU Utilization during the test period.

• Disk I/O Wait Time

  • A graph of Disk I/O Wait Time during the test period.

• Page Error Rate

  • A graph of page errors per minute during the test period.
  • A CSV file listing pages which have produced an error during the test.

• Disk Bandwidth Utilization

  • A graph of Disk Bandwidth Utilization during the test period.

• Network Bandwidth Utilization

  • A graph of Network Bandwidth Utilization during the test period.

• Peak Response Time

  • A graph of peak response time per minute during the test period.

• 95th Percentile Response Time

  • A graph of 95th percentile response time per minute during the test period.
  • A CSV file listing pages whose 95th percentile response time has exceeded the defined KPI.

The following images display the performance test graphs: