Baseline complete!

What you accomplished:

• Designed a realistic load profile with ramp-up, steady state, and ramp-down
• Added checks that validate response correctness on every request
• Ran a test to observe actual p95 latency, throughput, and error rate
• Set thresholds based on measured values with appropriate headroom
• Validated that your baseline test passes consistently
• Stored results in Grafana Cloud k6 for historical comparison

Skills unlocked

Examine your baseline

Look at your baseline results in Grafana Cloud k6 and consider:

• Threshold headroom. How much buffer did you leave above your observed p95? Tighter thresholds catch regressions sooner. Loose thresholds avoid false failures from normal jitter.
• Steady state stability. Were metrics steady during steady state, or did they drift? Drift can mean warm-up, a slow leak, or shifting dependencies.
• Check failures. Did any checks fail during the baseline? Decide whether that should change how you threshold the checks metric.
• Confidence. If you ran this test three times, would you expect the same outcome? If not, list what might vary (data, time of day, cold caches, shared environments).

You will reuse this same review habit after every code change or infrastructure update.

What’s next

Your baseline answers “what does normal look like?” In the wrap-up module, Apply the pattern to your own service is a short transfer checklist to run the same workflow on a URL your team owns (still on non-production).

After that, the next question is what happens when things are not normal. Stress, spike, and soak testing are the usual follow-on topics; use the k6 test types guide when you are ready to design those runs.