Tom Donohue

Incidents are expensive, stressful, and lead to poor user experiences. The good news is that they’re also preventable. With the right tools and practices in place, you can uncover and address performance issues before they impact your users.

In this beginner-friendly hands-on lab, you’ll learn how to make reliability testing part of your overall observability strategy, using k6 to identify performance bottlenecks proactively.

Starting with the low-code k6 Studio tool and progressing into k6 test scripts, you’ll learn how to test APIs, monitor websites using simulated traffic, and analyze test results in Grafana to build a deeper understanding of your system’s behavior under load. You’ll get practical guidance to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability, using testing and observability together to keep your systems fast, healthy, and outage-resilient.

And what happens when your local machine isn't enough? In the last half of the workshop, we will explore a cloud-native approach to scaling. You will learn how to use the k6 Operator to orchestrate distributed load tests directly on a Kubernetes cluster using Custom Resources.

By the end of three hours, you will:

• Build a complete k6 test flow, starting with k6 Studio and evolving into a full script.
• Perform API performance tests with meaningful thresholds, assertions, and checks.
• Visualize and analyze test results in Grafana dashboards to gain deep insights into system performance under load
• How to scale, moving from a single k6 instance to a distributed "runner" model to simulate massive load with the k6-operator for Kubernetes.

Requirements:

• Laptop with WiFi access
• Docker and Docker Compose
• An IDE, like VSCode or Cursor
• A terminal, like iTerm or VSCode, to run commands
• k6 OSS binary installed
• k6 Studio installed