Introduction

With this check you are able to measure the download bandwidth from an HTTP endpoint and validate that it stays within defined thresholds.

Details

This check continuously sends parallel HTTP GET requests to the specified URL and measures the amount of response body data received within each measurement window. Response headers are not included in the measurement.

It is intended to detect significant bandwidth changes, not to provide precise throughput numbers. For accurate bandwidth measurements, use a dedicated performance testing tool.

Use Cases

• Verify that your HTTP endpoints provide sufficient download bandwidth during chaos experiments
• Detect bandwidth degradation caused by network attacks or infrastructure issues
• Validate that bandwidth stays below a maximum threshold (e.g., to verify that a bandwidth limit attack is effective)

Parameters

Parameter	Description	Default
Duration	In which timeframe should the bandwidth be measured?	10s
Target URL	The URL to download from for bandwidth measurement.
HTTP Headers	(optional) The HTTP Headers.
Concurrent Requests	Number of parallel requests to execute simultaneously. More concurrent requests generate more traffic to saturate the available bandwidth. (min 1, max 50)	5
Required Success Rate	Percentage of measurement windows that must be within the bandwidth thresholds. Evaluated at the end of the duration.	100
Minimum Bandwidth	(optional) Minimum expected download bandwidth. Leave empty to skip.
Maximum Bandwidth	(optional) Maximum expected download bandwidth. Leave empty to skip.
Follow Redirects?	Whether HTTP redirects should be followed.
Connection Timeout	Connection timeout for a single call. Should be between 1 and 10 seconds.	5s
Read Timeout	Read timeout for a single call. Should be between 1 and 10 seconds.	5s
Skip certificate verification	(optional) Whether TLS certificate verification should be skipped.	false

Self-signed certificates

If you want to use self-signed certificates, you need to import them into the extension. You can do this by mounting a volume with the certificates and referencing it in extraVolumeMounts and extraVolumes in the helm chart. See instructions in the extension-http documentation.