Purpose and permission come first
A planned load test is an agreed experiment intended to answer a performance question. A DDoS attack aims to disrupt availability. Both may produce increased traffic, so a graph alone does not establish permission or purpose.
For an experiment, the responsible team should know the exact scope, timing, expected activity and stop conditions. Obtain agreement for third-party infrastructure where it is needed rather than assuming that an application account grants it.
Control makes the result interpretable
A useful test starts with a workload description and a baseline. Record what the simulated clients do, how long the run lasts and what counts as a successful response. A large peak without that context is difficult to translate into a capacity decision.
Start with a narrow question and bounded scope. Broader resilience exercises require their own plan, monitoring and coordination with the teams that operate defensive controls.
Know what your test did not establish
A representative application workload does not reproduce every possible availability threat. Conversely, surviving a high-volume traffic exercise does not demonstrate that a checkout journey performs correctly under normal business demand.
Keep the scope in the report: environment, edge configuration, dependencies, observed limits and excluded services. This helps readers use the result without assuming universal coverage.
Measure a decision, not a spectacle
Define what action will follow each likely outcome. A release can proceed, an endpoint needs investigation or a protection policy needs adjustment. Save the result and configuration so the next run can test whether the chosen change helped.
Use performance testing and defensive preparation as complementary practices. Neither replaces the other, and both improve when the team records uncertainty as carefully as the headline result.