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Chaos Agent Overview

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Introduction

The Chaos Agent is a key component of Azure Chaos Studio. It enables agent-based fault injection by running directly inside your target virtual machines (VMs). This approach allows you to simulate failure conditions that cannot be achieved through Azure's control plane alone.

Purpose

The purpose of the Chaos Agent is to introduce agent-based fault injection into your chaos experiments. Key benefits include:

  • Enhanced Fault Injection: By operating inside the VM, the agent enables faults that mimic real-world scenarios more accurately.
  • Beyond Control Plane Limitations: Some faults, such as deep system resource exhaustion, can only be induced from within the operating system.
  • Comprehensive Testing: Test your applications against conditions like CPU and memory pressure, and network disruptions.

How It Works

The Chaos Agent is shipped via VM extension and supports both Windows and Linux operating systems. Once deployed, it uses a managed identity to execute fault injection tasks directly on the target VM, allowing for:

  • Agent-Based Fault Injection: Running inside the VM to trigger faults that cannot be simulated externally.
  • VM Extension Delivery: Simplifies deployment across various environments.
  • Targeted Fault Scenarios: Offers precise control over the induced faults, ensuring your systems are rigorously tested.


Diagram showing how the Chaos Studio agent core components are packaged and hosted on a customer's virtual machine and how they communicate with the Azure managed service for Chaos Studio.

Key Scenarios Enabled

The agent facilitates several critical fault injection scenarios, including:

  • CPU Pressure: Simulate high CPU load conditions.
  • Memory Pressure: Induce scenarios such as memory leaks or high memory utilization.
  • Network Faults: Introduce network latency, packet loss, or disruptions.
  • Additional Faults: Explore further fault scenarios to challenge system resiliency. See our full fault library

Next Steps

This overview sets the stage for detailed documentation on configuring and using the Chaos Agent within your chaos experiments. For more in-depth guidance on setup, advanced configurations, and additional scenarios, refer to the subsequent sections of our documentation series.

For additional information, visit the Azure Chaos Studio Documentation.