k6

Stockholm, Sweden
2009
  |  By k6
Grafana k6 v0.45.0 has been released, featuring a new experimental module for gRPC streaming support, a new browser recorder extension for Firefox and Chrome, and tons of improvements for Grafana k6 OSS and Grafana Cloud k6. Here’s a quick overview of the latest k6 release and all the news from the community.
  |  By Marie Cruz
The Grafana k6 browser module simulates how users interact with a browser page and collects web performance metrics about the interaction. Since launching the module in 2021, we're frequently asked how it compares to Google Lighthouse as a tool to measure web page performance. This blog post compares k6 browser and Google Lighthouse from various perspectives.
  |  By k6
Grafana k6 v0.44.0 has been released, featuring new experimental modules, an upgraded browser module, and tons of improvements. Here's a quick overview of the latest k6 news from the team and the community.
  |  By Nicole van der Hoeven
There are many aspects of application performance, but they broadly fall into two categories: frontend performance and backend performance. As a tester, it’s important to know the differences between the two and how that impacts the way you approach your tests. In this blog, I’ll provide a high-level overview of frontend performance testing and backend performance testing, including pros and cons of each one.
  |  By Pablo Chacin
Modern applications are built on a microservices architecture that leverages cloud-native technologies. This architecture has many benefits regarding scalability and fault-tolerance of individual components, but it also increases the complexity of the applications, mostly due to the interdependencies between services. This complexity makes it difficult for engineers to fully understand how their applications will react to abnormal conditions, such as a dependency failure or performance degradation.
  |  By Wei Li
Organizations use load and performance testing to prevent issues from impacting customers, which is essential if they want to stay relevant in today’s digital-first world. And with the rise of cloud native technology and DevOps, software teams must shift performance testing left, towards development. However, traditional load and performance testing tools simply haven’t kept pace, leaving developers, operations, and QA teams siloed.
  |  By Enes Kühn
Load testing, which is as a type of non-functional testing that puts a structure or system under pressure and measures its response, might sound boring. In reality the entire process of planning, estimating, and implementing load tests against the system is like putting together pieces of a complex puzzle, and it can be a lot of fun.
  |  By Marie Cruz
As of k6 version 0.43.0, xk6-browser is now bundled in k6 as an experimental module! 🙌 Since announcing xk6-browser in November 2021 at Grafana ObservabilityCON, the team have been busy adding on new features to include browser automation in k6. The interest from the community has also increased, which shows that browser automation and frontend performance is as important as backend performance.
  |  By Yusuf Tayman
In this article, we will discover the process of sending custom metrics, provided to us through the xk6-browser, in order to gain a better understanding of our performance tests. Through the integration of these metrics, we will be able to create more tailored Slack messages that will help to manage our rule sets.
  |  By Marie Cruz
Grafana Faro and xk6-browser are both new tools within the Grafana Labs open source ecosystem, but the pairing is already showing a lot of potential in terms of frontend monitoring and performance testing. Faro, which was announced last November, includes a highly configurable SDK that instruments web apps to capture observability signals that can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data.
  |  By k6
Grafana k6 October 2023 Roundup.
  |  By k6
In this 100th episode of k6 Office Hours, the Grafana Developer Advocates celebrate how it all started! Join us at this live fika with our favorite drinks and discuss our favorite moments and episodes.
  |  By k6
In this episode of k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocates Marie Cruz and Paul Balogh are joined by Ivan Szkiba, the latest Grafanista of the k6 team, to discuss the latest developments on the k6 extensions.
  |  By k6
August 2023 Roundup.
  |  By k6
k6 browser adds browser-level APIs to automate browser actions and collect web performance metrics as part of your k6 test. It's an experimental module, and there is a good reason why! In this k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocates Marie Cruz and Nicole van der Hoeven are joined by Software Engineers Ankur Agarwal and Daniel Jimenez to discuss the breaking changes that are about to come to k6 browser! You wouldn't want to miss this.
  |  By k6
What do you do when you operate a platform needing to accommodate millions of IoT devices? This is precisely the scenario encountered by Daniel Mangum, Lead Cloud Engineer for IoT platform provider Golioth, when he created the newly open-sourced xk6-coap extension. In this k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Paul Balogh are joined by Daniel to discuss the nuances of working with varied sensors and devices using the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).
  |  By k6
What are the different ways to output k6 metrics? In this k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocates Marie Cruz and Paul Balogh are joined by Leon York, a Senior Consultant at InfinityWorks, part of Accenture, to discuss how the xk6-output-timestream extension works, his experiences creating a k6 extension, and more!
  |  By k6
In this k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocate Marie Cruz and Technical Content Manager Pepe Cano are joined by Ankur Narkhede from LambdaTest to discuss the browser integration between k6 and LambdaTest.
  |  By k6
K-SIX News - July 2023 Roundup.
  |  By k6
k6 Senior Software Engineer Oleg Bespalov talks about what gRPC even is, how to test gRPC services with Grafana k6, and how to use the new gRPC experimental module in k6. He is joined by Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Paul Balogh.

k6 is a developer-centric, free and open-source load testing tool built for making performance testing a productive and enjoyable experience. Using k6, you'll be able to catch performance regression and problems earlier, allowing you to build resilient systems and robust applications.

Quickly build test cases to validate the performance of your APIs or microservices. Validate that your system can handle the expected volume of traffic, and catch SLA/SLO-breaking performance regressions in CI before they reach production.

Built primarily for load testing, k6 tests can with advantage be reused for performance monitoring of your APIs and microservices in production.

Features:

  • Seamless scaling to the cloud: Designed to use the same test in a local, distributed or cloud environment. It provides an unified experience for various usage.
  • Built for automation: Designed for automating your performance tests. Get Pass/Fail behavior on your performance goals.
  • Write tests in Javascript code: Full scripting language to write realistic load tests. Reuse modules and Javascript libraries to build and maintain your test suite.
  • Multiple choices for storage: k6 can output test results to various backends and formats (Grafana, DataDog, Kafka, JSON).
  • Easy-to-use APIs and CLI: Designed for developers by developers. The k6 API and CLI is intuitive, flexible and powerful.
  • High-performance tool: The k6 engine is written in Go making to be one of the best performing load testing tools.

The best developer experience for load testing.