Deep Dive Into K6 Performance Testing Tool For Automation Testing

Grafana K6, better known simply as just K6, was developed by Grafana Labs. K6 is an open-source load testing tool used for performance testing. Using K6 allows you to test the reliability and performance of your systems. This helps you test the scalability of your application.

K6 was built with performance in mind, so by default, K6 does not load browsers which helps save resources, but it can be configured to run a browser if needed with xk6-browser. The tests for K6 are written in JavaScript, which isn’t too hard to pick up and learn and also really easy to edit. K6 also has 2 versions, the open-source free one, and the paid cloud version. K6 can also be added to your CI/CD pipeline fairly easily.

Features Most Used

The key features of K6 include its CLI tool that has developer-friendly APIs, its scripting in JavaScript, and automation-friendly load testing, checks, metrics, and thresholds.

Checks and Thresholds

Checks are the validations equivalent to Boolean validations that you would see in any automation framework and thresholds are the overall pass/fail criteria for your test metrics. As long as the performance of the system meets the conditions of the set threshold then the test will finish with a passed status.