How can I get useful load testing data for my AWS server?

Question

I have a system set up on AWS where I have a set of ec2 insatnces (as an application server from an elastic beanstalk) running in an auto-scaling load-balanced environment. All this works fine.

I would like to load test this instance in order to obtain results that help me to figure out what more needs to be done to the system in order for it to handle, potentially, millions of users. I have used a tool called Locust ( http://locust.io ) so far to do this. This allows me to send requests to my instance(s?) through a proxy as desired. However, I cannot tell whether the requests are being routed to multiple instances or the same one constantly; and if they are being load balanced appropriately I can't see how many requests each of the ec2 instances are receiving or their health under load. (I have a feeling that the requests are not being properly load balanced as the failure rate always seems to increase drastically at a similar point every test run.)

Is there a way to get this information inside from the AWS ec2 or elastic beanstalk consoles, or is there a better distributed web based load testing tool that can provide the data I need?

Answer 1

There are two ways to get this information

1) Create S3 Bucket and save ELB logs. You can filter these logs to check which instance is serving your request

2) Retrieve application level logs : If apache/nginx installed on your EC2 instances to serve the request. Filter apache/nginx logs in every machine

Hope it helps !!

Answer 2

There is a way to get this data from the AWS console.

Inside the elastic beanstalk console there is a tab titled health . This tab (in the enhanced health overview ) shows the number of requests per second, the response for the requests, the latency, the load average and the CPU utilisation for each ec2 instance being run by the elastic beanstalk.

An example of this data is shown in the following image.

This data allows the system manager to see which of their back-end instances are receiving requests and how many they are each being sent through a load-balancer and a proxy.

This can also be attained from the AWS CLI using:

eb health environment_name