Monitor the full end-user experience: k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are generally available

We continue to evolve Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring to help you simulate even the most complex transactions and user journeys, and proactively monitor the performance of your web applications and APIs. 

In line with this effort, we’re excited to share that k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are now generally available.

Browser checks allow you to collect frontend web vitals, capture custom performance metrics, and simulate user actions like clicking buttons or completing forms, so you can gain an even deeper understanding of performance and availability from your end users’ point of view. 

You can continue reading to learn more about this feature and how it works, and also watch a demo of k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring in the video below.

The need for robust frontend monitoring

As websites and web apps become more complex, measuring frontend performance and user interactions has become critical. Traditional methods, such as real user monitoring (RUM), can help, but are often reactive, meaning they only provide data after end users have encountered issues. Meanwhile, protocol-level tests, like HTTP checks, are limited to measuring server responses and don’t provide insight into what actually happens in the browser.

These gaps can lead to blind spots in performance monitoring. For example, you might never know if your users experience slow load times, broken layouts, or issues with form submissions, which can hinder the end-user experience and your app’s success.

What teams really need is a way to proactively monitor the user experience in real time by capturing everything from page load to interactions, and ensuring every workflow functions as expected.

Introducing k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring

With k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring, you gain full control of a headless Chrome browser using a Grafana k6 script. This enables you to simulate real user actions like clicking buttons, filling out forms, or navigating between pages, while also capturing essential metrics, such as web vitals.

This powerful feature allows you to go beyond traditional monitoring, enabling you to test and validate real user flows and gain insight into performance in ways you can’t with HTTP-level checks. With browser checks, you’re not just monitoring performance at a protocol level; you’re simulating user interactions that provide you with a much richer view of your app’s behavior in production.

Browser checks help teams confidently answer questions like:

• Is our login flow working across all regions?
• Did that last deploy impact our page load times?
• Are users seeing broken layouts or slow interactions?

More specifically, here’s what k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring bring to the table:

• User-centric visibility: Browser checks provide an end-to-end view of your web app’s performance from a user’s perspective. Tracking key web vitals, such as LCP, INP, and CLS, gives you the full picture of the user experience. For example, if your app is slow to load or interactions like button clicks are lagging, these checks can help you pinpoint these issues before they negatively impact users.
• Custom workflow simulation: Log in, click buttons, fill out forms, scroll, and validate content—exactly as your users would. This helps identify performance bottlenecks that might otherwise be hard to detect, like issues with complex user flows or third-party scripts affecting performance.
• Script reusability: Easily reuse k6 scripts for browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring for performance tests in Grafana k6 or Grafana Cloud k6, streamlining your workflow. This portability allows you to use the same test scripts across different use cases, making it easier to scale your testing strategy.

How k6 browser checks work

To create a k6 browser check in Synthetic Monitoring, you can follow these steps:

1. Write a script using the k6 browser module. Alternatively, you can use the browser recording feature in k6 Studio, an open source desktop application that helps you create k6 test scripts quickly and easily via a visual interface. With browser recording, now in public preview, you can record user journeys directly in the browser and convert them into reusable k6 scripts, making it even easier to build powerful checks with minimal setup.
2. Define your scenario: simulate a user login, complete a workflow, or interact with the UI.
3. Set assertions to validate elements or performance expectations.
4. Schedule the check across different probe locations.
5. Visualize results in the check’s dashboard, with full support for Prometheus metrics and alerting.

Wrapping up

To recap, k6 browser checks in Synthetic Monitoring are a game-changer for frontend observability, allowing you and your team to:

• Simulate critical user journeys from across the globe
• Measure real-world frontend performance with web vitals
• Catch regressions before they reach production
• Reuse the same scripts across load testing and monitoring

Please reference our technical docs to learn more about creating your first browser check, as well as configuration and generated metrics. 

You can also join our upcoming webinar to learn how Grafana Cloud k6, Synthetic Monitoring, and Frontend Observability provide full visibility into your most critical user experiences.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with synthetic monitoring. We have a generous forever-free tier that includes 100k test executions per month and more.  Sign up for free now!