A small tip that might be useful for some: to replicate real-life incoming network requests without affecting production systems, you can use the nginx mirror directive [1], which will copy targeted requests to the system(s) under test. We use this quite often for blue/green type deployments and the like.
It's a versatile tool! Important to note though that nginx will wait for the mirrored requests to complete before it responds to the main request. you can somewhat mitigate this by setting a low mirror timeout.
1. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_mirror_module.html