Test how your application handles an Azure SQL Database outage. Run Gremlin network experiments and reliability tests to validate timeouts and failover.
Azure SQL Database enforces resource limits, and reaching them does not produce a clean outage. It produces throttling, rejected connections, and query timeouts arriving intermittently while the database stays technically available. Applications handle a hard failure far better than they handle this.
The ambiguity is what spreads the damage:
- One expensive query pushes the database toward its DTU or vCore ceiling.
- Other requests slow down or get rejected, and your application cannot tell a throttled request from a failed one.
- Retry logic fires on work that should have been abandoned, adding load to a database already at its limit.
- Because the database is shared, teams who never wrote that query start seeing symptoms in their own services.
Gremlin lets you reproduce the messy middle rather than only the extremes. Latency experiments slow the connection to what a throttled client experiences. Blackhole experiments remove the endpoint so you can confirm your connection pool recovers without a restart.
Shared databases spread their problems to teams who did nothing to cause them. Testing shows you how far those problems travel before anyone notices.
Dependencies: Failure Test
Simulate a failed dependency by dropping all network traffic to the dependency.
Dependencies: Latency Test
Recreate poor network conditions by delaying all network traffic to a dependency by 100ms.
* Testing a dependency doesn't require installing anything on it. Gremlin runs the experiment from the service that calls it, so compatibility depends on that host rather than on the dependency itself. Check our compatibility documentation for supported operating systems and platforms, or get in touch if you don't see yours.
Intelligent Health Checks - Azure
Automatically monitor your Azure services during testing in one-click with Intelligent Health Checks.
Avoid downtime. Use Gremlin to turn failure into resilience.
Gremlin empowers you to proactively root out failure before it causes downtime. See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin.
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