Load testing for call peaks

PROBLEM

Nobody knew how many simultaneous call agents the operation could hold before degrading. Peaks were discovered in production, with customers on the line, and the physical telephony ran through local carriers with no way to measure what gave out first: the server, the link, or the carrier.

CONSTRAINT

Testing had to run against the same physical telephony and the same local carriers the operation uses, without taking the service down or buying extra capacity for the experiment. And the output had to be readable by the operations team, not only by a network engineer.

WHAT WE BUILT

A test bench that measures real server capacity, evaluates the critical usage points and finds the operation's break-even point. It simulates different peaks and reports an estimate for each, analyzes the network problems that surface and turns them into concrete action items. On top sits an agent that explains to the team, in plain language, what failed in each test and why.