As load balancing can introduce extra complexities into your environment, it's important to ensure that you can test your setup thoroughly. Especially when you're trying to debug corner cases, being able to build a test platform becomes critical to reproducing faults or issues.
Ideally, you want this combined with real-time metrics as well, especially if you want to be able to overlay this with data from your upstream servers. As we'll cover in Chapter 13, NGINX Plus – The Commercial Offering, the commercial release of NGINX contains a live monitoring module which provides information such as the current connections, upstream server statuses, and load information.
While there are a lot of programs and cloud services around which you can generate load to test your load balancer from a client perspective, I didn&apos...
