Breaking Windows with Chaos Engineering

Today, Gremlin is excited to announce that our agent is available to help "break" Windows for greater reliability with Chaos Engineering. Windows servers comprise around 30% of the total server market, which means there are lots of critical Windows applications that need to be tested for resilience.

Now from within the Gremlin app, engineers can run chaos experiments on any Windows system (Server 2008 R2 and later, Windows 7 and later) in order to build confidence in the reliability of Windows applications and services.

The Windows agent currently allows you to run Shutdown, CPU, Disk, I/O, Memory, Blackhole, and Latency attacks. The remaining attacks are in development and we'll notify you when they're released.

Run Your First Windows Chaos Experiments

At its core, the Gremlin Windows agent is a simple to use service that is straightforward to install and configure on your Windows machines, making them easy to discover, visualize and target for running chaos experiments using our intuitive web app or our easy to use API. You can install the agent on as many machines as needed so that you can visualize all of your infrastructure and choose either specific ones to run experiments on, or set a percentage of targets randomly chosen to impact.

We simplified the process of representing your infrastructure landscape in the Gremlin UI so that you can focus on running Chaos Experiments to learn how your Windows system behaves under various failure scenarios.

You can identify machines using tags, such as operating system types, cloud service zone and region, etc. Or use custom identifiers you can define for each machine when configuring the Gremlin service.

After defining your blast radius, choosing, configuring, and running a Gremlin attack is very straightforward.

Windows Chaos Experiments

Many of Microsoft’s enterprise applications are designed for high availability applications and Gremlin’s Windows agent provides a safe, easy way to build confidence that those reliability features are configured for your application.

For example, you can run a shutdown attack to test your Windows Server Failover clustering and build a robust Active Directory service. Attack your network to ensure SQL Server replication doesn’t lose data. And finally, guarantee reliable communications by attacking your Microsoft Exchange Server.

Chaos experiments on Windows give you the assurance that your business critical applications can withstand the chaos of the real world. Try it yourself by requesting a free Gremlin trial.