Azure Measuring Agents

This document describes how to launch Measuring Agents in Azure as VM instances.

Measuring Agent offering in the Azure Marketplace

Azure based Measuring Agents can be launched from Azure’s Marketplace. Use this link   to find the offering or enter “RealLoad” in Azure’s search bar:

You should find the following offering:

Launch a VM instance, CPU and memory settings

Click on the “Create” button and select a VM size. For evaluation purposes, a VM with 2GBs of memory will suffice. The memory and CPU sizing will vary depending on length of the performance test to be executed, number of concurrent VUs and amount of data transferred.

Setting an SSH key on the virtual machine is not required, as typically you wouldn’t have to login at the OS to the VM instance.

Disk settings

You can configure the disk to be destroyed on VM termination, as all collected measurements should have been transferred back to the RealLoad portal by the time the VM is destroyed.

Network settings

The VM requires a public IP address, so that it can be reached from the RealLoad portal   server. There is no strict requirement to retain the IP address after termination of the VM instance.

Auto shutdown settings

Optionally you can configure the instance to automatically shutdown at a time when you’re sure that your test execution has been completed.

Setting the agent secret

In order to configure the Agent Secret you’ll need to base64 encode the following string:

AGENT_SECRET=secret1234

Replace “secret1234” with the secret you’d like to use to protect access to the agent.

To Base64 encode the above string, you can use Notepad++ or the Base64 tool   available in the RealLoad portal   :

After encoding the string paste it into the “User Data” field.

After this screen, click on Create to start the Virtual Machine and wait until it has launched.

Obtaining the VM’s external IP address

Once launched, obtain the VM’s external IP address from the VM overview screen. You’ll need the IP address in the next steps, to configure the Measuring Agent instance on the RealLoad portal   .

Configuring the agent on the ReaLoad Portal

Now that the Measuring Agent is launched, you can configure it in the RealLoad Portal, in the Measuring Agents   section:

Click on the “Add Measuring Agent” button and then enter the agent’s IP address and secret.

Verifying connectivity to the agent

Once configured, you can verify connectivity to the Measuring Agent by using the “Ping Agent” functionality:

The result should indicate that the agent is reachable.

Troubleshooting

Connectivity issues

Port Filtering (Security Rules)

When launching the offering, a firewall rule should automatically have been added to allow inbound connections on port 8080.

You can verify connectivity on a Windows computer using powershell, as follows:

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName ip_address_of_agent -Port 8080

On Linux/MacOS you can use openssl:

openssl s_client -connect agent_ip_address:8080

If the result indicates that port 8080 is closed, then check the Azure network security group associated to the VM instance to make sure that port 8080 is actually open:

Other issues

For any other issues please contact us at support@realload.com .