August 27, 2020

Top 3 Options for Running Performance Tests Behind a Corporate Firewall

Performance Testing

One of the biggest struggles that many Performance Testing Engineers face when running tests from a cloud environment is firewall performance testing or how to test behind their company’s firewall.

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What is Firewall Performance Testing? 

Firewall performance testing is considered a key part of external network penetration testing. Firewall testing is one of the most important types of network tests that can be conducted as firewalls represent the first line of defense against outside threats. Luckily, BlazeMeter has 3 easy solutions that should cover any company’s security needs!

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BlazeMeter's Three Easy Firewall Performance Testing Solutions

 

These three solutions from BlazeMeter give you options to implement firewall performance testing in your environment. These solutions can help solve one of the biggest struggles that software performance testing engineers face when running tests from a cloud environment behind the company's firewall

 

1 - Whitelist (or Allowlist) our IP Addresses

 

Whitelisting is BlazeMeter's free solution for getting around this issue.  It is quick and easy to implement but does offer some security drawbacks.

 

What is whitelisting?

 

Whitelisting is the process of creating lists of trusted IP addresses or IP ranges that will allow requests made from those IPs through your corporate firewall.

 

Most corporate firewalls are configured to block most or all incoming traffic.  This makes testing those applications from a cloud platform impossible without a workaround.  Through whitelisting, your network team can configure your firewall rules to allow requests coming from BlazeMeter IP addresses through the firewall, which will enable you to test from our Platform.

 

This handy guide will walk you through how to obtain our IP addresses. Once you have those IPs/IP Ranges whitelisted, you’ll be ready to begin firewall performance testing.

 

2 - Using Dedicated IPs

 

What are Dedicated IPs?

 

Dedicated IPs are pretty much exactly what they sound like, single Dedicated IPs that you can use with your test runs at your leisure.  These IPs belong to your account and will not be used by any other BlazeMeter users.

 

Many of our more security-conscious customers have network security policies that don’t allow for the whitelisting of large amounts of IPs or IP ranges.  In these cases, a more precise solution is required.  This is where Dedicated IPs come in.  They are singular IPs that can be run with any tests on your account.  Once purchased, the IPs can be assigned to the location of your choosing and they will be provisioned into your account in short order.

 

You can assign dedicated IPs to your BlazeMeter engines.  Each IP address belongs to a specific region, for instance, US East (Virginia), EU West (London), or any other Google Cloud location. 

 

Dedicated IPs are only available for Enterprise plans. For more details, please contact your BlazeMeter account manager. We recommend that you purchase one IP address for every engine on your plan.

Examples:

  • 20 engines plan = 20 IPs
  • 50 engines plan = 50 IPs
  • 100 engine plan = 100 IPs

 

If you are interested in purchasing Dedicated IP’s, then please take a look at this guide.

 

3 - On-Premise Testing with Private Locations

 

On-Premise testing is BlazeMeter’s most secure option for testing with our platform and is utilized by many of our clients.  As such, this option will require setup from the user side and necessitates a qualifying plan before they can be implemented.

 

Private locations are the on-premise solution when you need to test applications or create Mock Services behind a firewall. To learn more about the off-premise architecture, see Cloud vs Private Location.

 

With this service, you do not need to make incoming requests. You only install our agent on your on-premise servers. The agent gives your servers a "heartbeat" by sending outgoing requests to BlazeMeter to check if any tests started for the Private location. If any test started, BlazeMeter responds with instructions for these servers. Your load generators then send traffic to your application while sending data back to BlazeMeter, so you have full access to our real-time reporting.

 

Private locations are self-service machines and require you to maintain and upkeep them on a regular basis.

  • Private Location  is your on-premise environment, formerly known as a 'harbor'.
  • Agent - any server on which you install our agent is an agent within a Private location. These are your load generators. Formerly known as a 'ship'. 

 

For more information about BlazeMeter’s On-Premise solution, we recommend reading this guide.

If you are interested in such a solution, then please feel free to send us an email and we’ll be happy to help you!

Here is another guide that can offer some clarity about On-Premise testing.

BlazeMeter has many solutions to help with firewall performance testing. Request a Demo to learn more about how BlazeMeter can help solve your testing challenges. 

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