[shifte]

You can definitely do all those things with JMeter, although the user experience is pretty naf, Gatling[3] is definitely much better at that front if you're comfortable writing Scala.

When it comes to Protocol Level Testing, those two tools are still pretty much the best bang for buck, and by far the most popular open source load generators.

If the target you're hitting is a web app and you want to create a more realistic load scenario without crafting individual requests, check out a tool called Flood Chrome, which uses thousands of instances of Google Chrome[1] to generate load. It uses the same scripting language as SeleniumJS, so it's quite easy to learn.

Also on the topic of Flood [2], they're a very good platform for abstracting away the server orchestration and results collection you'll face when you try to scale up from 1 to N servers running either Gatling or JMeter.

[1]: https://chrome.flood.io/

[2]: https://flood.io/

[3]: https://gatling.io/