Wether you are running an application in the cloud or on-premises it is becoming increasingly common to test the application to both understand its behavior under certain conditions and to make changes proactively based on projected load and use. This is particularly true in an age where applications are becoming more distributed thanks to technologies such as microservices, Kubernetes, and serverless.
Don’t Forget the Infrastructure
As tools emerge to aid developers and operations teams in gaining better understanding of their applications and identify root causes behind bugs, outages, and latency, it is important to consider the infrastructure these applications run on as an element in testing. After tracing down issues and turning over every stone in the quest to troubleshoot application performance, couldn’t it be possible to come up empty if you stop at the OS, container or API? Issues such as disk or network latency, noisy neighbors, or unplanned network and other infrastructure outages can negatively impact application performance and remain invisible without the proper tools.
Recently at Networking Field Day 20, the delegates in attendance and the audience at large had the opportunity to hear from Netrounds about their solution and how it aids enterprise IT teams in testing of network and application performance and ensures SLAs are being met. By use of agents, the solution is able to test performance of applications and network infrastructure not only on premises, but also in public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Netrounds’ agents bring a wealth of testing options to customers including but not limited to the ability to test such network infrastructure components as WAN and SD-WAN, wired connections, and wireless access layer. Not to mention application use cases such as VoIP and IPTV. The presentation videos from Networking Field Day are comprehensive and provide plenty of detail on all of the platform’s capabilities.
Although the agents that perform the testing can be deployed across a number of sites including multiple clouds, they can all be managed through a single centralized controller. This acts as a means of viewing test results as well as managing the agents themselves.
Automate the Boring Stuff
These capabilities are all very valuable in a testing platform, but in order for any new solution to gain wide acceptance in enterprise IT it must be able to play a part in the increasingly automated workflows and infrastructure within. For those organizations that have gone down the automation and DevOps path, Netrounds has made both a REST API and Netconf API available so that customers can integrate the testing process into new and existing workflows. This functionality is table stakes in modern enterprise IT and its good to see Netrounds include it.
Ken’s Conclusion
No matter how much we abstract infrastructure and conceal it behind an API, it is still a very real and factor in application performance and overall user experience. Given that, it is important that infrastructure is taken into consideration when planning end to end testing. Tools that are designed to be integrated into automated workflow will have a clear advantage for enterprise IT customers. With the breadth of testing options and the ability to automate testing through the use of Netrounds’ APIs, the company has positioned their product for success.
