Google launches new open source based tools for simplified evaluation and visualization of cloud performance. With the release of PerfKit Benchmarker and Perfkit Explorer, the company enables cloud users to measure the relative performance of Google Cloud Platform with ease.

Perfkit Benchmarker helps users to measure and compare cloud offerings. It achieves this by using a set of benchmarks. This tool has been designed to operate via vendor provided command line tools. It provides wrappers and workload definitions around popular benchmark tools in its bid to make using these type of tools simple to use and driven by automation.

How does it work?
PerfKitBenchmarker instantiates virtual machines on the cloud provider of choice followed by automated installation of benchmarks; workloads are then run all by themselves with no prompts or pop-ups during benchmark run. The user would be required to accept the license of each benchmark individually. The user can also run benchmarks without cloud provisioning – incase the user wants to run it on a local machine – with a simple workaround.

PerfKit Explorer is Google’s extensible dashboarding and performance analysis tool. Both PerfKit Explorer and PerfKit Benchmarker are licensed under the Apache 2 license terms. PerfKit helps in composing queries and dashboards: offered as a service and web front end, it enables sharing of the results.

Google has made these tools available on GitHub and welcomes developer participation in working with these tools.