Bowen Chen

Properly testing a service’s APIs to ensure that it can handle production traffic presents many challenges for engineers—SREs need to guarantee the resiliency of their application, while developers must ensure that their features perform well at any given scale. Speedscale is a testing framework built for Kubernetes applications that enables you to load test with real-world production scenarios by replaying actual API traffic that your application has experienced. Using Speedscale, customers can capture snapshots of real-time traffic and use them to generate sanitized load tests without any scripting required.

We’re excited to announce that you can now purchase Speedscale’s software license in the Datadog Marketplace. By using this software license with Speedscale’s free integration, you can view your Speedscale reports alongside the rest of your application telemetry hosted in Datadog APM, enabling you to more efficiently troubleshoot poor performance. In this post, we’ll cover how to use this integration to publish Speedscale reports as Datadog Events and visualize key traffic replay data using an out-of-the-box dashboard.

Track Speedscale reports as Datadog Events

Speedscale’s traffic replay feature enables you to simulate incoming requests to your service endpoints and respond with outbound traffic to mock dependencies. When configuring a replay, you can increase the number of traffic copies to simulate high throughput, inject faults such as bad status codes, and increase response latency to test your service’s reaction to varied conditions. Speedscale will summarize each traffic replay in an associated report. As shown below, reports measure how well your test performed against defined goals and provide key performance metrics alongside a copy of your configuration settings for the given replay.

Using Speedscale’s integration with Datadog, you can ingest your Speedscale reports as Datadog Events. The example below shows a Speedscale report that missed its goals within Datadog’s Event Explorer. Leveraging the Event Explorer to search for past reports enables you to conveniently view your report history in a single unified location. By aggregating your reports by attributes such as errors, you can track the simulated situations where your application most frequently misses your goals.

Additionally, you can correlate your service’s traffic replay performance against its historical application performance in Datadog APM. For example, you can first look at the Service Catalog to monitor a specific service and observe how it responds to high volumes of requests in an actual production setting, before comparing that with its performance during similar traffic replays that are simulated within Speedscale. This enables you to check whether your application displays equal performance under similar conditions, and if not, serves as a starting point into investigating why.

Visualize key traffic replay data with the Speedscale dashboard

Once you’ve configured Speedscale to send reports to Datadog, you can begin visualizing your traffic replay results in an out-of-the-box dashboard. Using the Speedscale dashboard, you gain a high-level overview of your most recent traffic replays, enabling you to quickly and easily monitor whether the latest version of your service has been performing in line with your testing goals. Replays with missed goals will automatically be ingested into Datadog as error events and can highlight potential issues in your service.

By using the dashboard to track your replay volume, you can observe how often your application passes versus misses your testing goals, which can be a general indicator for application health.

Start monitoring your Speedscale tests with Datadog today

The Speedscale integration enables you to visualize and track your Speedscale testing data alongside your application performance within a single platform. To begin monitoring traffic replays in Datadog, install the free integration and sign up for a 14-day trial of the software license, now available in the Datadog Marketplace. If you aren’t already a Datadog customer, you can learn more about the Marketplace in our blog post and sign up for a free 14-day trial of Datadog today.

The ability to promote branded marketing tools is a membership benefit offered through the Datadog Partner Network. If you’re interested in developing an integration or application that you’d like to promote, you can contact us at marketplace@datadog.com.