Earlier this week I received a question about using SCOM to do large scale load testing on a website. While SCOM can be a great resource with synthetic transactions to simulate a finite number of user transactions and APM can give you code level instrumentation of how your .NET app is performing it isn’t really designed as large scale load test rig. You could certainly set up a large number of synthetic transactions executed from anywhere you have a SCOM agent, but when you start talking about the need to simulate 10,000+ transactions against a single site then you are entering a territory where SCOM isn’t the right tool for the job.
If you want to do some basic load testing you can do this natively inside Visual Studio Online
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-studio-online-vs.aspx
First enter the url of the site you want to load test & give your test a name.
Next pick which Microsoft Azure Datacenter you want your test to be executed from:
Select the number of test users. Simple tests are capped at a max of 200 users (You get 20,000 free user minutes per month)
Select how long you want the test to run for:
Set the Think-time
Select a browser distribution
Then just click Test now
It will take a few minutes to acquire the necessary resources and configure agents
Results will appear as below:
For more advanced load testing check out the Part II post.