Pega recommends performing thorough functional and performance testing on your application in this higher environment to simulate production load and production use cases. Follow the testing strategy defined in your Route to Live Plan. Your QA team must certify to your migration team that all your use cases have successfully passed testing before the final data migration into production.

Performance and Load Testing     

After the dry run data is migrated into your production environment without errors, Pega strongly recommends that you run a series of performance and load tests. Because every Pega solution is unique, it is crucial that you evaluate and validate the performance of your Pega solution running in Pega Cloud prior to production Go Live.

Simulate a production load on the application and emulate real-world use cases and interactions to ensure that your application suits the needs of your business. Evaluate performance on the production or production mirror environment to ensure performance is being tested with production-like usage. The lower environments typically have fewer resources and smaller databases.  Performance issues might not be identified there.

For example, a new report might be incorrectly designed to display data from all the rows in a database table.  In the development environment, with the test data, there may be 300 or so rows of data, which works fine for the report.  But in production, there could be 2 million rows of data in the table, and the report would take a very long time to run and then fail.  It is important to discover this type of issue before your users begin to use the application.

Closely monitor PDC for alerts and issues that may arise throughout the testing phases. Address issues and alerts before production Go Live to avoid potential business impacts. Pay specific attention to any alerts highlighting increased interaction times (compared to the KPI in lower environments) and incorrectly handled exceptions.

For more information, see:

• Conducting load testing - Pega Academy module that covers designing a load testing strategy, and leveraging load testing best practices
• Performance testing - outlines the process for performance testing, including the various types of tests and tools  
• Measuring system performance - Pega Academy module that covers tools for performance testing
• Debugging System Performance - Pega Academy module that covers guardrails, common issues, and alerts, as well as diagnosing and addressing database, rule assembler, and rule caching issues
• Monitoring system health - An article that covers a variety of ways to identify and resolve system issues
• [Video]: Using PDC to investigate runtime errors and exceptions

Functional Testing

In addition to the performance tests, re-run all of your functional, user, and other tests in this environment after you have completed migrating the dry run data.  Because the Pega Cloud production environment has a higher production level (5 vs. 4 or less for the lower-level environments), and stronger security, it is important to do a full round of testing in this environment before Go Live.

PDC Monitoring – Production

In addition to any other testing or monitoring, also monitor your application with PDC, as described in PDC Monitoring. 
Do this in conjunction with Pega.