Testing Latency On The Oracle Cloud

One of the best things about working on the HCM Cloud Center of Excellence team at Oracle is that you learn something new every day.

I recently worked on an inquiry from a customer asking about latency testing: has anyone ever done it and, if so, how did they go about it?  In all honesty, it was a stumper for me.  I had no idea how to respond.  Fortunately, one of the folks on the team put the question out to a wider audience.  The answer that came back was pretty spiffy.

Oracle offers latency testing as a service (LTaaS?).  You can get the basic explanation on how it works here.  But a short explanation follows:

Step 1:  Log into Oracle MyServices.

Note that you'll be asked details here about the Cloud Account you'd like to test.  If you're like me, you don't exactly have those details memorized or close at hand.  No worries; See the Orange zone to the right?  Click on the "Account Details" button - you'll have the opportunity to get information on all the Oracle Cloud accounts and services tied to a specific email address.  I actually tested this; received my results via email in about five minutes.

Step 2:  Select the domain you'd like to test.  Click on your username drop-down and select "Diagnostics.

Step 3:  Click on "Test" (I've put a red box around the Test button in the image below)

Step 4:  Once the test completes, you'll see something like the following result:

Step 5:  See the "Details" selection above?  Click it to get details similar to those below:

These details show the five tests run, the file sizes for each test, and the related network latency and throughput.

Like I said, pretty spiffy.  I did this myself for my Oracle HCM Cloud environments.  Took about 10 minutes total, including getting the info on my various accounts.  So, for those of you wanting to perform latency testing on your Oracle Cloud environments, the service is the way to go.

Now, because it's important to give credit where credit is due, the gentleman who educated me on this  is Oracle's Pierre-Luc Pelletier.  Because most of us in the States will butcher the French pronunciation of his name, we refer to him as "PL".  One of my incredibly smart teammates and the source of a wealth of information.  We're fortunate to have him on the team.

So, now that the word is out, y'all can go forth and test your own network throughput.  I look forward to hearing about it.  Comment welcome.