Performing a Latency Test

Hello,

the recommendation of tools and solutions depends on a lot of factors (e.g. whether you want to do a simple latency test or a load test).

For a quick manual check you can always use tools like ping, iperf or netperf. Running ping <url> -c 50 for example will send 50 ICMP packets and then show you the min, max and mean latency. This approach of course is manual and depends from where you run it.

For more automated approaches I would first recommend looking at the CloudWatch metrics of your Elastic Load Balancers. One of the metrics is TargetResponseTime this is the "time elapsed, in seconds, after the request leaves the load balancer until a response from the target is received" (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-cloudwatch-metrics.html).

Route53 also offers the option to create health checks and monitor latency. When you create a health check you can choose to monitor the status of an endpoint and choose the Latency graphs option to get insights into TCP connection time, time to first byte and time to complete SSL handshake (see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/monitoring-health-check-latency.html).

AWS X-Ray traces user requests as they travel through your application and help you get insights into how your application is performing and discover root causes. With the tracing features, you can follow request paths to pinpoint where in your application and what is causing performance issues. Integration depends a lot on the framework you use (e.g. for Node.js see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-nodejs.html).