Fault Injection

The fault injection filter can be used to test the resiliency of microservices to different forms of failures. The filter can be used to inject delays and abort requests with user-specified error codes, thereby providing the ability to stage different failure scenarios such as service failures, service overloads, high network latency, network partitions, etc. Faults injection can be limited to a specific set of requests based on the (destination) upstream cluster of a request and/or a set of pre-defined request headers.

The scope of failures is restricted to those that are observable by an application communicating over the network. CPU and disk failures on the local host cannot be emulated.

Currently, the fault injection filter has the following limitations:

  • Abort codes are restricted to HTTP status codes only
  • Delays are restricted to fixed duration.

Future versions will include support for restricting faults to specific routes, injecting gRPC and HTTP/2 specific error codes and delay durations based on distributions.

Configuration

Note

The fault injection filter must be inserted before any other filter, including the router filter.

Runtime

The HTTP fault injection filter supports the following global runtime settings:

fault.http.abort.abort_percent
% of requests that will be aborted if the headers match. Defaults to the abort_percent specified in config. If the config does not contain an abort block, then abort_percent defaults to 0.
fault.http.abort.http_status
HTTP status code that will be used as the of requests that will be aborted if the headers match. Defaults to the HTTP status code specified in the config. If the config does not contain an abort block, then http_status defaults to 0.
fault.http.delay.fixed_delay_percent
% of requests that will be delayed if the headers match. Defaults to the delay_percent specified in the config or 0 otherwise.
fault.http.delay.fixed_duration_ms
The delay duration in milliseconds. If not specified, the fixed_duration_ms specified in the config will be used. If this field is missing from both the runtime and the config, no delays will be injected.

Note, fault filter runtime settings for the specific downstream cluster override the default ones if present. The following are downstream specific runtime keys:

  • fault.http.<downstream-cluster>.abort.abort_percent
  • fault.http.<downstream-cluster>.abort.http_status
  • fault.http.<downstream-cluster>.delay.fixed_delay_percent
  • fault.http.<downstream-cluster>.delay.fixed_duration_ms

Downstream cluster name is taken from the HTTP x-envoy-downstream-service-cluster header. If the following settings are not found in the runtime it defaults to the global runtime settings which defaults to the config settings.

Statistics

The fault filter outputs statistics in the http.<stat_prefix>.fault. namespace. The stat prefix comes from the owning HTTP connection manager.

Name Type Description
delays_injected Counter Total requests that were delayed
aborts_injected Counter Total requests that were aborted
<downstream-cluster>.delays_injected Counter Total delayed requests for the given downstream cluster
<downstream-cluster>.aborts_injected Counter Total aborted requests for the given downstream cluster