I am trying to simulate real-life traffic to this server, and I want to capture some data and overall I want to play around what ways I can break it. By traffic I mean either http, ssh or any kind of network call. Like when it breaks on the network layer, then figure different ways to do this. Then ok spin up couple Vms or docker containers with some apps running there and talking to some database. Then how much traffic can those handle, database breaks first probably. and so forth.

I am basically looking for different experiment ideas but more importantly the tools that allow such things to be done.