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Start with Azure Load Testing service

  • February 21, 2023
  • 6 min read
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.

One big new service available (in Preview) is the possibility to stress your application, to see how your application answers to the heavy load and under stress.

You can see more information here: What is Azure Load Testing? | Microsoft Learn

Here is the diagram provided by Microsoft:

Azure Load Testing

To start the use of the service, go to the Azure Portal and search for Azure Load Testing. And create a new one:

Create a load testing resource

Choose your encryption type, and create it:

Choose your encryption type, and create it

It takes less than a minute to deploy it:

Manage deployed resources and costs

Regarding IAM roles, you can assign the following roles:

  • Load Test Owner: Can do everything
  • Load Test Contributor: Can view/create/update/delete/execute load tests
  • Load Test Reader: View/list load tests but cannot do any changes

I assigned the Owner role to one of my Azure AD account:

I assigned the Owner role to one of my Azure AD account

 

I tried with a guest account, and I had the following error:

You can’t use this service with guest account

I don’t know why, but apparently, you can’t use this service with guest account.

We can now do load test. 2 types of tests are available:

  • Quick test
  • JMeter script

We will do the quick test in this example. For the JMeter upload, you can follow this article: Apache JMeter – User’s Manual: Getting Started

We will start the quick test wizard:

Create a quick test

We will test this website: http://starwind.florentappointaire.cloud

Choose the number of virtual users that you want to test. Maximum 11250.

Choose the test duration in seconds.

The ramp up time in seconds.

At the end, it will estimate the cost in virtual hours, in my case, 3.33. The cost will be the following:

9.41€/month for the resource it self. It includes 50 virtual user hours. So in my case, nothing more to pay. Pricing table is available here: Azure Load Testing – Pricing | Microsoft Azure

Now, create a new quick test, with the

Create a new quick test

Click on Run test. The test is created and will start:

Click on Run test. The test is created and will start

 

After a few seconds, the test has been started and you can find some information regarding the test, and the most important part, the response time:

You can find some information regarding the test

You can also see the load of the engine that runs the script:

You can also see the load of the engine that runs the script

When the test is done, 120 seconds for me, you can find all information on the run page. As you can see, for 100 users, my website response time was less than a second, with 0% error and 19597 requests have been done:

When the test is done, you can find all information on the run page

If I check the performance of the app itself, I can see the number of requests, data in/out and response time of the web app:

Check the performance of the app

And for the app service plan, we can see that CPU took a lot of traffic 😊 :

And for the app service plan, we can see that CPU took a lot of traffic

On the welcome page of the test, you can see all tests that have been executed:

On the welcome page of the test, you can see all tests that have been executed

This new service, currently in preview, can be very useful to test a heavy charge on your website and check the performances of your app service plan for example, to size it correctly.

Hey! Found Florent’s insights useful? Looking for a cost-effective, high-performance, and easy-to-use hyperconverged platform?
Taras Shved
Taras Shved StarWind HCI Appliance Product Manager
Look no further! StarWind HCI Appliance (HCA) is a plug-and-play solution that combines compute, storage, networking, and virtualization software into a single easy-to-use hyperconverged platform. It's designed to significantly trim your IT costs and save valuable time. Interested in learning more? Book your StarWind HCA demo now to see it in action!