Load Testing
Load testing is a regular part of managing your systems and their connections to the PingOne platform, especially to test anticipated increases or surges in usage or traffic. The following guidelines will help you conduct load testing in a way that will yield accurate results based on your service level agreement (SLA) and the inherent limits of the PingOne platform. For more information, refer to Platform Limits.
The first step in any load testing process is to create a Support Case notifying Ping Identity of the planned testing before you begin.
Ping Identity monitors customer traffic to proactively detect attacks and other threats. Load testing can be difficult to distinguish from attacks and other malicious actions. Unannounced load testing can trigger the following:
-
Ping Identity’s threat detection systems might automatically block some or all traffic from your organization. This can not only invalidate the results of your load testing, but also disrupt your production environment user experience.
-
Surges in SMS and email traffic can result in service providers restricting or shutting down all traffic from the source domains associated with those surges.
-
Both of these can degrade the reputation scores of the sending domains and IP addresses, causing Ping Identity’s threat detection systems to delay, restrict, or block traffic from those sources.
These effects can negatively impact your real end users ability to register with an email confirmation, to sign on to your PingOne environment, or to authenticate using SMS passcodes. These effects can persist for a long time after your load test, and are not quickly or easily fixed once they occur.
Creating a Support Case well in advance of any load testing allows Ping Identity to adjust threat detection systems in advance of anticipated traffic surges. This will yield more accurate results for your load testing with minimal disruptions to your regular operations.
Load testing guidance
When you notify Ping Identity ahead of your load testing we can provide guidance on response times and load limits specific to your SLA, so you can know what to expect in terms of platform performance. The information we provide includes:
-
Whether it is appropriate to increase your capacity allotment beyond your current SLA.
-
Transactions per second (TPS) and response time expectations, including rate limit variations per endpoint.
If your expected surge exceeds these limits, you can coordinate with Ping Identity to meet your needs.