Meet Chaos Panda: How New Relic Does Chaos Engineering With the GraphQL API

New Relic is enhancing the resilience and efficiency of its systems by employing chaos engineering and adversarial gamedays, focusing on controlled and thoughtful experiments to understand system behavior during failures. The Unified API team has integrated chaos engineering practices into their GraphQL API, utilizing a tool called Chaos Panda to intentionally disrupt system responses, such as adding latency or causing field errors, to test and improve system robustness. GraphQL is favored for its ability to manage complex queries through a single endpoint, unlike traditional REST APIs. Chaos Panda allows for pre-production testing by configuring GraphQL to simulate errors and delays, providing insights into partial response handling and opportunities to strengthen the code against potential failures. This approach is part of New Relic's broader initiative to simplify and enhance the development and testing processes for their developers, marking the beginning of their journey in using the GraphQL API for chaos engineering.