Load testing can determine whether your system will scale successfully during
production use, and find any bottlenecks that prevent it from scaling during an
event.

1. **Three to five months before your event**, you should perform load testing
   on critical projects and workloads to simulate peak traffic.

2. Investigate the quota and cost implications of the load tests and consider
   creating [Cloud Billing budget alerts](https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets.md.txt) that
   will monitor the expense of the services that you are going to stress the most.

3. After each test, evaluate the results and use Capacity Planner to
   visualize your usage and forecast data, and request quota increases as necessary.
   For more information, see
   [Use Capacity Planner](https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/peak-events/secure-capacity.md.txt#use-planner)
   and [Request a quota adjustment](https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/peak-events/secure-capacity.md.txt#quota).

If you require assistance, contact your account team or TAM. They can help you
capture and plan architecture changes to improve the overall reliability and
availability of your services.

## What's next

- [Conduct disaster recovery testing](https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/peak-events/conduct-disaster-recovery-testing.md.txt)