---
title: "Proactive testing | Grafana Labs"
description: "Find problems before users do"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## What is it?

Tools to **find problems before users do**: synthetic monitoring runs automated checks from global locations, and k6 tests how your system performs under load.

## When you need it

| Scenario                                            | What proactive testing provides             |
|-----------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| You want to catch outages before users report them  | Synthetic checks run continuously.          |
| You need to verify critical user flows work         | Browser-based tests simulate real users.    |
| You’re launching a new feature or expecting traffic | Load testing reveals breaking points.       |
| You need to monitor from different regions          | Global test locations show regional issues. |

## Questions answered

| With proactive testing, you can answer…          |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| Is my site up right now from users’ perspective? |
| Does the checkout flow actually work end-to-end? |
| Can we handle Black Friday traffic levels?       |
| How does performance vary across regions?        |

## Problems solved

| Problem                                                 | Solution                                       |
|---------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------|
| “Users report issues before we know about them”         | Synthetic monitoring detects issues first.     |
| “We don’t know if critical flows work until users fail” | Browser tests verify user journeys.            |
| “We don’t know our capacity limits”                     | Load testing reveals breaking points.          |
| “We’re surprised by performance issues in production”   | Pre-production testing catches problems early. |