The theory of the multiverse states that every possible outcome takes place somewhere, and from sausage fingers to pig superheroes from another dimension, Hollywood loves showing us how differently things could play out if one small change is made. But since in reality we can’t see everything that will happen — or everything that will go wrong in our IT tech stack — it’s important to prepare for every kind of challenge you can imagine.
Planning for Problems
That is what businesses do as they develop new digital products and services today. Before you ever see a new application or website it’s gone through weeks or months of rigorous testing, with behind-the-scenes engineers trying their hardest to break it and understand performance issues before they even happen. Known as chaos engineering, it’s a valuable tool by which testers try to anticipate the hundreds of problems that might occur once a new application or component is put out there in the real world, supporting organizational data observability goals. This testing can be narrowed to a specific area where problems are expected or allowed to randomly select a scenario anywhere across your network. It helps develop more fault-tolerant systems and validate how well you expect your system to perform in a variety of different conditions.
When chaos engineering is successfully used, it helps teams identify and correct potential issues early in development, before impacting customers and harming revenue. The lessons learned in chaos engineering also help IT teams understand your systems better and streamline future project development efforts.
More Effective Chaos
Effective chaos engineering requires clear hypotheses to test, the ability to effectively measure the results of the simulations, and a plan to use the insights to mitigate the issues discovered before products go into production. There are two approaches that can help make chaos engineering more impactful. The first is stress testing, which helps you identify performance bottlenecks when your product is exposed to real-world conditions such as being hit with millions of users. The second is synthetic monitoring, which helps identify problems while ensuring the system meets service-level agreements. Chaos engineering complements both approaches to proactively identify how the system will handle failures and unexpected conditions.
The Apica Difference
The Apica Ascent platform combines the best of testing and synthetic monitoring to help you make the most of your chaos engineering experiments. Apica allows you to simulate user behavior as they access your high-traffic systems from around the world, while still in development, to identify and troubleshoot issues before issues arise in production. It gives you a range of baseline performance metrics in realistic scenarios and issues that can affect your performance, including datacenter failovers, DNS & routing issues, hardware malfunctions and complete regional network or power outages. The insights provided by Apica can help you achieve true observability, to make more intelligent business decisions.
Apica provides monitoring capabilities that allow teams to monitor the performance of their systems in real-time, providing insight into response times, error rates, and other key metrics during your chaos engineering experiments. It gives you valuable insights into how stresses impact every facet of your network architecture and applications.
Combining the power of the Apica platform with the strategic planning of chaos engineering allows you to build systems that can withstand failures and continue to function without disrupting service even during a partial system outage. You may not be able to see everything in the multiverse of problems that can arise in today’s world, but Apica helps you focus on what matters — ensuring that the user journey is seamless. The Ascent platform complements your chaos engineering strategy to anticipate and resolve issues before they impact employees or customers, protecting the bottom line.
