This is documentation for the next version of K6. For the latest stable release, go to the latest version.

Grafana k6

Open source

Grafana k6

Grafana k6 is an open-source, developer-friendly, and extensible load testing tool. k6 allows you to prevent performance issues and proactively improve reliability.

Overview

Using k6, you can test the reliability and performance of your application and infrastructure.

k6 helps engineering teams prevent errors and SLO breaches, enabling them to build resilient and high-performing applications that scale.

Engineering teams, including Developers, QA Engineers, SDETs, and SREs, commonly use k6 for:

Load and performance testing
k6 is optimized for minimal resource consumption and designed for running high-load performance tests such as spike, stress, or soak tests.
Browser performance testing
Through the k6 browser API, you can run browser-based performance tests and collect browser metrics to identify performance issues related to browsers. Additionally, you can mix browser tests with other performance tests to get a comprehensive view of your website’s performance.
Performance and synthetic monitoring
You can schedule tests to run with minimal load very frequently, continuously validating the performance and availability of your production environment. For this, you can also use Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring, which supports running k6 scripts.
Automation of performance tests
k6 integrates seamlessly with CI/CD and automation tools, enabling engineering teams to automate performance testing as part of their development and release cycle.
Chaos and resilience testing
You can use k6 to simulate traffic as part of your chaos experiments, trigger them from your k6 tests or inject different types of faults in Kubernetes with xk6-disruptor.
Infrastructure testing
With k6 extensions, you can add support to k6 for new protocols or use a particular client to directly test individual systems within your infrastructure.