A while ago , a colleague of mine was asking me about the availability test and my first answer was , do you mean soak/endurance test? , but I was wrong , both tests have something in common but they are totally different in the objective of the test.

What is Availability Testing?

As a general idea, availability is a measure of how often the application is available for use. More specifically, availability is a percentage calculation based on how often the application is actually available to handle service requests when compared to the total, planned, available runtime.

So the idea here is to run tests for longer period of time and collect failures , logs and any other metrics that represent the system availability.

But there is a one more thing to consider , how long it takes a system to switch between active and backup servers , wether it is application or database server , more important is what is the system actual downtime.

How to run availability test?

1. You have to design a test which can be run for a longer period with a moderate number of users , the number of users is not a key factor here as we are not going to collect performance metrics.
2. It is time to down one of your working server(s) , in this case will be your active/primary server wether it is a application or database based on the target of your test.You should start receiving errors in your tool and here you can start to count the number of failures and how long it takes your system to move to the secondary / backup node.
3. Once your system is up again , note all of the errors and time it takes your system to work normally again.
4. you can repeat the operation to switch again from the backup to primary server or servers.

Why we do Availability Testing?

The target here is to measure and collect data in case of application / database failure , and to make sure that your application setup is properly configured and with a reasonable downtime which will not affect your customers badly in case of unplanned failures or downtime.

Please share your tips, experience, comments, and questions for further enriching this topic of discussion.