Microsoft Introduces a Fully-Managed Azure Load Testing Service in Preview

Azure Load Testing is a service that can be leveraged by testers, quality assurance engineers (QA), and developers for application performance, capacity, and scalability optimization. The service uses the popular open source load and performance tool, Apache JMeter, to create load testing through existing scripts.

Azure Load Testing gives detailed resource metrics for Azure-based applications to identify performance bottlenecks.

Nevertheless, you can host your application on any service, and the type of service determines the type of metrics collected and displayed on your dashboard. The client-side metrics show the test engine report on the number of virtual users, request-response time, and the number of requests per second. The server-side metrics also give information on Azure application components.

Azure Load Testing incorporates Azure networking best practices for securely running your tests, and if application endpoints or Azure components start throttling requests, the Load tests will be automatically aborted.

Data like your Apache JMeter script stored in the Azure Load Testing resource is always automatically encrypted with service-managed keys.

Azure Load testing can be integrated into continuous integration and deployment pipelines at particular phases during SDLC. It can be used for automatically running load tests at the end of each sprint or staging environment and with Azure Pipelines or GitHub Action workflows. You can also specify pass and fail rules in the test configuration to detect performance behavior during development. Automated load test will also be aborted if Azure Load Testing detects specific error conditions - the AutoStop listener in JMeter can also carry out this function.