Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs’ k6 is an open-source load testing tool designed specifically for developers. It supports hybrid performance testing, combining end-to-end browser testing and load testing within the same script. k6 can be utilized for various testing purposes including load testing, end-to-end web testing, synthetic monitoring, fault injection testing, infrastructure testing, and regression testing. The tool allows scripting tests in JavaScript and integrates with a wide range of tools such as Postman, New Relic, Visual Studio, Grafana, IntelliJ IDEA, Datadog, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Pub/Sub, Amazon SQS, Kafka, and OpenTelemetry. k6 offers both an open-source version and a cloud-based version known as Grafana Cloud k6. The cloud version enables distributed and scalable load testing from 21 load zones to simulate real global traffic patterns, and includes features like automated performance analysis, collaborative workspaces, and enterprise-grade security. It supports integrations with CI/CD tools for automated performance testing and provides dashboards, out-of-box visualizations, and a rich UI for result analysis. The k6 Cloud also offers a free tier with 500 virtual user hours each month, as well as premium support and enterprise-grade security, audit, availability, and compliance. k6 has a community-driven extensions ecosystem that enhances its capabilities with additional functionalities like SQL, Browser, Kafka, Kubernetes, Chaos, MQTT, and more. Acquired by Grafana Labs in June 2021, k6 boasts over 200,000 users from more than 190 countries and conducts 6.5 million load tests every month for its open-source version. The open-source product has garnered 15.8k stars on GitHub and has 660 forks. k6 emphasizes a developer-centric experience, integrating seamlessly into developers’ workflows and DevOps automation flows, and offers fault injection testing with xk6-disruptor to test resilience patterns and tolerance of internal errors in Kubernetes-based applications. The load testing manifesto of k6 focuses on simple testing, goal-oriented testing, developer-centric load testing, and automation.