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June 16, 2026
How to Scale Chaos Engineering
Learn to build replicable testing practices that can be adopted by teams across your organization in this actionable guide.
Prove value with a single service
Select a critical service to maximize impact
For your first service, start with one where an outage would have the biggest customer impact to get the most value from your testing.
Define Health Checks from customer-impacting metrics
A Health Check monitors systems before, during, and after a test. Use metrics that impact users, such as the four SRE Handbook signals.
Discover and test dependencies
Map your dependencies, then test how your service reacts to dependency outages. These tests alone can take services from 99.9% to 99.99% uptime.
Start with the most common failures
Most outages are caused by the same common failure modes. Start with these failures, then you can add tests unique to your architecture.
Interpret test results and take action
Address risks uncovered by failed tests by analyzing results and adding work to sprints. Use possible customer impact to prioritize fixes.
Scale and Improve
Roll out testing the same way for other services
Use the test suite to onboard other services across your organization following the same steps. Remember to point to your initial victories when talking to cautious or hesitant service owners.
Build processes around regular testing and review
As you scale, create reliability processes that integrate with established engineering practices. You should be able to address issues as part of your normal sprint instead of during incident response.
Use exploratory testing to fill in test coverage
Now that your teams are addressing the biggest issues, use Chaos Engineering to uncover the failures unique to your architecture, then add them to your standardized tests.
Set schedules and automation to test regularly
Reliability isn't a one-and-done activity. Systems are constantly shifting, so run the same group of tests on a regular schedule to catch changes and create a record of your service reliability.
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