What are common pitfalls to avoid during failover testing?

Failover tests should mirror real outages and cover the services you depend on. Common pitfalls include assuming failover works just because a SIM registers or shows signal strength, not exercising actual traffic or critical applications, and not validating how long recovery takes or how VPN and remote access behave after the switch. Other frequent misses are testing at the wrong site conditions, skipping alert delivery checks, and not documenting the exact configuration and test results such as health-check targets, failure thresholds, retry timing, preferred SIM, data limits and session handling quirks. To reduce risk, run staged faults with production-like traffic, verify both paths, measure time to failover against uptime targets and test return to primary under realistic loads. Keep a simple, auditable record of the configuration and outcomes so you can repeat or adjust the test later.