Tracking work in an asynchronous application or service during load testing

Embodiments presented herein provide techniques for evaluating an asynchronous application using a test framework. The test framework may perform a load test of an asynchronous application or service composed from a collection of applications or services. To do so, the test framework may submit transactions to a distributed application at a specified transaction rate and monitor how the distributed application operates at that transaction rate. An aggregate load test component may evaluate the remaining work pending at work accumulation points of the distributed application to determine whether the distributed application can sustain the specified transaction rate. A transaction tracking component may initiate transactions to generate load at the specified transaction rate without blocking while the transactions are processed by the distributed application.