Direct Connect Testing

When testing Direct Connect (DX) type of connections, there are multiple aspects to check:

1. Redundancy: Ensure that the connections are redundant. How they terminated within or across DX location determines what level of redundancy that can be achieved. See AWS Direct Connect Resiliency Recommendations
2. Backup: Ensure you have backup path over VPN (Internet) when all DX connections are down. This should be part of backup link testing.
3. Failover convergence and recovery of traffic testing: Test how much time is getting elapsed after a given connection is down and before a new path is available for the traffic
4. Bandwidth, throughput, latency: Tools like iperf can be useful. You may have to run those tests with parallel streams (-P parameter) to measure full performance, for 10Gbps connections and run them long enough (for e.g., ~10mins).