Hidden Features and Shortcuts in Gremlin

Targeted Attacks: Use custom labels to target specific groups of hosts or containers for chaos experiments.
Command Aliases: Create aliases for complex commands to simplify their execution.
Multiple Attacks: Combine multiple attack types in a single experiment to assess system behavior under multiple failure scenarios.
Attack Pausing: Pause an ongoing attack to investigate the system state without terminating the entire experiment.
Random Attack Intervals: Set random intervals for attacks to introduce unpredictability in your experiments.
Attack Sequencing: Create sequences of attacks to simulate complex failure scenarios.
Attack Output Suppression: Suppress attack output to reduce noise and focus on critical information.

Introduction

Gremlin, a powerful chaos engineering platform, offers various hidden features and shortcuts that can significantly enhance your experience with chaos experiments. In this tutorial, we will explore some of these lesser-known features that can save time and provide more control over your chaos testing activities.

Example 1: Scheduling Chaos Experiments

Gremlin allows you to schedule chaos experiments for a later time, which is helpful for conducting tests during low-traffic periods or when your team is unavailable to supervise the experiments.


    $ gremlin schedule attack cpu --time "2023-07-20T03:00:00" --duration 1h --target frontend-service

In this example, we schedule a CPU attack on the "frontend-service" to start on July 20th, 2023, at 3:00 AM and last for 1 hour.