What is the LoadGen Load Testing and Monitoring Platform?
The LoadGen Load Testing and Monitoring Platform is a browser-based platform that combines load and performance testing, continuous monitoring, and user-experience analytics in one web interface. It is delivered as part of the LoadGen Appliance, a pre-configured virtual machine that runs all platform services in Docker containers.
You use the platform to answer three questions about your applications and infrastructure:
- Will it cope? Simulate realistic user load against your environment and measure how it behaves under stress (load and performance testing, API testing).
- Is it working right now? Continuously run user journeys, health checks, and uptime probes against your systems, and get alerted the moment something breaks (end-to-end monitoring, uptime monitoring, alerting, service levels).
- How is it used and experienced? Capture real user sessions, analyze visitor behavior, and track compliance against defined service level objectives (SessionSight, Analytics, Service Levels).
This article walks through every module of the platform and what it does for you. Each module has its own section in this documentation category, with one article per page, so every link below takes you to the exact page documentation.
Home dashboard
When you sign in, the Home dashboard is your central command center. Four KPI cards show real-time system metrics: Active Users (current concurrent users), Test Status (whether a test is running), Total Runs (lifetime test count), and Agents (registered agents). Two feature panels, Load Testing and E2E Monitoring, summarize each area and give you quick actions such as Run Test, View all results, Open Dashboard, and View Profiles, together with your licensed capacity.
Load and performance testing
The Testing module is where you run load tests against your environment:
- Testing: Load Profiles define how virtual users connect to your system under test. A profile combines a connection technology (such as Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, or RDP), user credentials, connection parameters, and the test scenario to execute. Profiles are organized by technology type and can be created, modified, cloned, and deleted.
- Testing: Run Test configures and launches a test from a load profile, immediately or at a scheduled time, with scenario visualization and validation before execution starts.
- Testing: Active Test is the live control center while a test runs: real-time performance metrics, error tracking, user activity, and operator controls in one dashboard that updates automatically.
- Testing: Schedules gives a cross-profile view of recurring test schedules. Each load profile can own at most one schedule.
- Testing: Test Runs holds historical test results with filtering, trend comparison over time, and drill-down into individual executions.
The building blocks a test needs (workload scripts, scenarios, test users, agents) are managed in the Configuration module, described below.
API testing
The API Testing module automates functional testing of your APIs:
- API Testing: Flows are sequences of API calls that define your test scenarios. The Flows page is the central hub showing every flow with its status, source origin, node count, and last execution result.
- API Testing: API Sources is a registry of OpenAPI specifications. LoadGen monitors registered sources for changes, detects when APIs evolve, and identifies which flows are affected.
- API Testing: Environments define base URLs, HTTP headers, and variables per target system (for example staging versus production), so you can switch targets without editing each flow.
- API Testing: Auth Profiles centralize reusable authentication credentials, including Bearer tokens, API keys, and OAuth2 flows.
- API Testing: Schedules run flows automatically on cron expressions, for example hourly smoke tests or daily regression suites. Schedules only execute against flows committed to a stable revision.
- API Testing: Run History is the chronological audit trail of all flow executions with outcomes, timing data, and validation results.
End-to-end monitoring
End-to-End Monitoring continuously executes complete user journeys against your applications so you measure what a real user experiences:
- End-to-End Monitoring: Profiles define the continuous testing scenarios, show their status and configuration, and track resource usage against your license allocation.
- End-to-End Monitoring: Schedules display a weekly calendar of when profiles run, so you can verify coverage and spot gaps.
- End-to-End Monitoring: Dashboard gives real-time visibility: key performance indicators, agent connectivity status, and historical trends in one view.
Uptime monitoring
Uptime Monitoring covers lightweight availability checks across your infrastructure:
- Uptime Monitoring: Dashboard shows health and availability for all monitored services: uptime percentages, real-time metrics, and incident tracking.
- Uptime Monitoring: Checks is the central hub for all configured checks, with real-time status, search and filtering, and quick management actions.
- Uptime Monitoring: Incidents are created automatically when a check fails and resolve automatically when it recovers; you can also resolve incidents manually.
- Uptime Monitoring: Maintenance windows pause checks during planned downtime so maintenance does not trigger false alerts.
- Uptime Monitoring: Scripts manages reusable PowerShell scripts that checks reference, with optional promotion to Git remotes for cross-environment deployment.
Service levels
Service Levels turn your performance expectations into measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and track compliance:
- Service Levels: Dashboard is the entry point showing SLO configuration status, performance summaries, and storage readiness, with guided setup when nothing is configured yet.
- Service Levels: Health tracks per-service compliance rates and status across selectable time windows, and lets you trigger on-demand evaluations.
- Service Levels: Objectives is the read-only catalog of all SLOs with compliance status and error budget consumption, with drill-down into compliance history.
- Service Levels: Violations shows breach and NoData diagnostics within a time window, for investigating compliance failures.
- Service Levels: Operations bundles the administrative controls: data retention, recalculation, export, and alert rules for SLA violations.
- Service Levels: Status pages publish service availability to external audiences. Published pages are served anonymously, no sign-in required.
- Service Levels: Access Control adds per-service allow-lists, deny-lists, and sensitivity masking on top of role-based permissions.
Service, objective, and policy definitions are managed under Configuration, see below.
Alerting
Alerting uses a three-tier model: Trigger (how an alert reaches you), Profile (when an alert fires), Check (what is monitored).
- Alerting: Triggers configure the delivery channels: Email, Webhook, SMS, and WhatsApp. You can create multiple triggers of the same type with different destinations.
- Alerting: Profiles define trigger conditions, severity levels, and notification channels, reusable across the Monitoring, Testing, and Uptime scopes.
Analytics
- Analytics: Dashboard is the unified health view across API testing, uptime monitoring, and end-to-end monitoring: real-time health scores, success rates, response times, and an AI-powered insights section that analyzes patterns and gives recommendations.
Insight: infrastructure monitoring
Insight monitors the machines in your test environment through LoadGen Insight agents:
- Insight: Dashboard shows agent fleet health, version distribution, and organizational grouping, so you can verify data-collection capability before a test.
- Insight: Machine Groups organize agents into logical groups with per-group monitoring settings, thresholds, and WMI collection, including drag-and-drop onboarding of newly connected machines.
SessionSight: web analytics and session replay
SessionSight is LoadGen's web analytics and session tracking platform. It captures how real users interact with your web applications:
- SessionSight: Dashboard shows KPIs, real-time visitor activity, goal conversions, and event distribution for a selected tenant, container, date range, and segment.
- SessionSight: Visitors lets you browse and filter visitor profiles: behavior patterns, conversion rates, demographics, and traffic sources.
- SessionSight: Replay plays back recorded user sessions to analyze behavior and troubleshoot issues.
- SessionSight: Heatmaps visualize where users click, scroll, and encounter issues, with device-specific views.
- SessionSight: Funnels analyze step-by-step conversion drop-off through multi-step workflows.
- SessionSight: Journeys is a wizard that correlates captured sessions with LoadGen monitoring data and generates test journey candidates, exportable to LoadGen Script (LGS) format for load testing. This closes the loop between real user behavior and your test scenarios.
- SessionSight: Attribution applies multi-touch attribution models to understand which marketing channels and campaigns contribute to conversions.
- SessionSight: Insights delivers AI-generated weekly summaries of trends, anomalies, and significant shifts in your metrics.
Sync: multi-appliance configuration
Sync keeps configuration consistent across multiple LoadGen environments using a Local/Master model:
- Sync: Overview shows the current synchronization mode, connection status, and last sync time.
- Sync: Repositories manage the connections: Local appliances request access to a Master, and Masters approve and manage connected repositories.
- Sync: Collections group related configuration items (load profiles, flows, schedules) into named bundles you push to or pull from the Master.
- Sync: History is the commit timeline with filtering and side-by-side comparison of what changed between versions.
Configuration
The Configuration module holds the shared building blocks the other modules use:
- Configuration: Datasources define where each functional area stores its data, with backends including InfluxDB, SQL Server, CSV and JSON.
- Configuration: Workloads is the library of LoadGen script files (.lgs) that define user behaviors, organized in folders with usage status and version control.
- Configuration: Notification Accounts hold the SMTP mail servers and Twilio accounts used for email, SMS, and WhatsApp notifications.
- Configuration: Credential Profiles store the credentials LoadGen uses during tests and monitoring: Windows Run-As accounts, Basic authentication, SQL, API keys, bearer tokens, service principals, Azure Function keys, custom headers and OAuth2.
- Configuration: Virtualization connects the platform to Omnissa Horizon and Azure Virtual Desktop environments targeted by your tests.
- Configuration: Add-in Machines manage LoadBot extensions that add Citrix and Remote Desktop Services capabilities.
Dedicated configuration sections exist per module:
- Configuration LoadGen Agents: the agents that generate load. Full Agents (port 4840) provide complete load generation; Core Agents (port 4850) provide basic capabilities; VDI Agents (port 4841) run profiles directly on AVD and Omnissa Horizon machines.
- Configuration Systems Under Test: the machines LoadGen monitors during tests, with Windows Performance Counter collection (CPU, memory, disk, network), reusable counter templates, and per-machine settings.
- Configuration Testing: scenarios (user ramping phases), the test user pool (VDI and Web users), and wait events that synchronize execution across scenario phases.
- Configuration API Testing: retention policies for flow runs, HTTP artifacts, API definition versions, and debug events.
- Configuration End-to-End Monitoring: platform agents (API keys for agents connecting over outbound HTTPS, no inbound firewall rules), schedule definitions, and the monitoring user accounts tests run under.
- Configuration Insight: registration, grouping, API keys, and health of Insight machines.
- Configuration SessionSight: analytics tenants, data containers, API keys, goals, funnels, retention, and scheduled tasks.
- Configuration Service Levels: services, objectives, mappings between them, business-hours and exclusion policies, the evaluation scheduler, and snapshot storage (SQL Server or PostgreSQL).
Operations and security
The Operations module covers platform administration:
- Operations: Permissions is the role-based access control hub: roles, permission assignments, user accounts, and access to repositories and collections.
- Operations: SSO Providers integrate OpenID Connect identity providers such as Azure AD or Google Workspace, so users sign in with corporate credentials.
- Operations: Settings consolidates system-level configuration: security tokens, AI providers, support ticket preferences, and SessionSight tracking.
- Operations: LoadGen Tickets tracks support tickets your appliance has submitted to LoadGen, with real-time development status and resolution information.
Infrastructure and licensing
- Infrastructure: Appliance manages the appliance itself: SSL certificates, backups, networking, security settings, Docker containers, and system health.
- Infrastructure: Licensing shows which modules are licensed, their capacity limits and expiration dates, and refreshes license data from LoadGen Cloud.
The LoadGen Appliance
The platform ships as the LoadGen Appliance, a pre-configured virtual machine with all components installed, running as Docker containers. Deployment guides cover VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VirtualBox, Microsoft Azure, and AWS, plus initial setup, network configuration, SSL, backup and restore, and updates.
- Start with the LoadGen Appliance Overview and LoadGen Appliance - System Requirements.
Automating the platform
Everything the platform does can also be driven programmatically. The LoadGen On-Prem API is a REST API for configuring tests, controlling agents, executing tests, retrieving results, and CI/CD integration. The LoadGen MCP Server exposes the platform to AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol, so tests can be configured, run, and analyzed through natural-language requests.
The full developer documentation lives in a dedicated customer portal. See LoadGen Developer & API Documentation for what it covers and how to request access.
Where to go next
- New to the platform? Read Getting started with the LoadGen Platform for a step-by-step first-use path.
- Want to know how the documentation itself works? Read How to use this documentation to learn how every page article is structured and where to find the how-to workflows.
- Looking for what changed in a release? See the release notes for LoadGen FrontEnd (on-prem) and LoadGen API, MCP Server and Appliance (on-prem).