Establish a k6 baseline

Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.

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Establish a performance baseline with k6

Welcome to the Grafana learning path that shows you how to establish a performance baseline with k6. A performance baseline is a set of known-good metric values, such as response time and error rate, that represent how your system behaves under a realistic load. Without a baseline, you have no benchmark to compare against when something changes.

This path guides you through the complete process of creating a baseline: designing a realistic load profile, adding correctness checks, running a test, interpreting the results, encoding your baseline as thresholds, and storing results in k6 Cloud for historical comparison. By the end, you’ll have an automated test that passes or fails based on your system’s actual performance characteristics.

The image below shows an example k6 Cloud test result with passing thresholds based on baseline performance values.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

Understand what p95/p99 latency, throughput, and error rate mean as baseline metrics
Design a load profile with the ramping-vus executor that reflects realistic traffic
Add checks to validate response correctness alongside performance
Interpret k6 summary output including percentiles and averages
Define thresholds that make your test pass or fail based on baseline criteria
Save and compare results in k6 Cloud