Revealing the presence of magnetic octupole order and associated octupole fluctuations in solids is a highly challenging task due to the lack of simple external fields that can couple to magnetic octupoles. Here, we demonstrate a methodology for probing the magnetic octupole susceptibility of a candidate material, PrV
2
Al
20
, using a product of magnetic field
H
i
and shear strain
ϵ
j
k
as a composite effective field, while employing an adiabatic elastocaloric effect to probe the response. We observe Curie-Weiss behavior in the obtained octupolar susceptibility down to approximately 3 K. Although octupole order does not appear to be the leading multipolar channel in PrV
2
Al
20
, our results nevertheless reveal the presence of strong magnetic octupole fluctuations and hence demonstrate that octupole order is at least a competing state. More broadly, our results highlight how anisotropic strain can be combined with magnetic fields to probe elusive ‘hidden’ electronic orders.