Shift left with reliability testing: A hands-on introduction to k6

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, simulate user interactions in a browser, 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.

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 and assertions
• Run browser-based tests that simulate real user journeys
• Use synthetic monitoring checks for continuous validation
• Visualize and analyze test results in Grafana dashboards to gain deep insights into system performance under load

Requirements:

• Laptop with WiFi access
• Linux/MacOS/Windows
• An IDE, like VSCode or Cursor, installed
• A terminal, like iTerm or VSCode, to run commands 
• k6 OSS binary installed
• k6 Studio installed

Access to the Grafana Cloud Stack will be provided.

This lab is tailored for developers and SREs.