Performance Testing and observability in Grafana Cloud

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring a smooth and reliable end-user experience is critical. Join us to explore how Grafana’s suite of observability tools—Grafana Cloud k6, Frontend Observability, and Synthetic Monitoring—helps engineering teams test, monitor, and optimize user journeys across the software lifecycle.

Best of all, you’ll learn how to reuse the same k6 test scripts across performance testing and synthetic monitoring, streamlining workflows across development, QA, and production.

Whether you’re focused on frontend development, QA, or production reliability, this webinar will show how Grafana provides full visibility into your most critical user experiences.

1. Performance testing
and observability in
Grafana Cloud
Pepe Cano
Staff Developer Advocate
Imma Valls
Staff Developer Advocate

2. Do you have questions?
Add them to Zoom Q&A and we will answer as
many as we can at the end of our talk.

3. Challenges Engineering Teams Face
with Performance Testing
●User experience
≠ Engineering
team’s view
●Testing often
happens after
problems arise

●Teams might not
test their
services with the
realistic traffic

4. The lifecycle of Reliable Software

Detect
Respond and fixObserve

5. Grafana Alloy
Your
Environment
Loki
Logs
Grafana
Visualizations
Tempo
Traces
Mimir
Metrics
Pyroscope
Profiles
Applications
and
Infrastructure
Native
OTel, Prometheus
No Lock-in
Open standard
Composable Stack
OSS or Commercial
Your open and composable observability stack
Keep data where it is
Big Tent
Data Sources
Cost Management | Security & Governance | Configuration (as code)
Kubernetes
Server/VM
Cloud
Providers
eBPF
IRM
Serverless
Testing Infrastructure
Observability
Incident Response
Management
Performance
Testing

Synthetic
Monitoring
FrontendService Maps KubernetesServer/VM
Cloud
Providers
Database
AlertingSLO
Application Infrastructure
Frontend
Observability solutions
Application
Infrastructure
Cloud providers

6. Grafana Alloy
Your
Environment
Loki
Logs
Grafana
Visualizations
Tempo
Traces
Mimir
Metrics
Pyroscope
Profiles
Applications
and
Infrastructure
Native
OTel, Prometheus
No Lock-in
Open standard
Composable Stack
OSS or Commercial
Your open and composable observability stack
Keep data where it is
Big Tent
Data Sources
Cost Management | Security & Governance | Configuration (as code)
Kubernetes
Server/VM
Cloud
Providers
eBPF
IRM
Serverless
Testing Infrastructure
Observability
Incident Response
Management
Performance
Testing

Synthetic
Monitoring
FrontendService Maps KubernetesServer/VM
Cloud
Providers
Database
AlertingSLO
Application Infrastructure
Frontend
Observability solutions
Application
Infrastructure
Cloud providers

7. The lifecycle of Reliable Software

Detect
Respond and fixObserve

8. Swiss Cheese Model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model#/media/File:Swiss_cheese_model_textless.svg
Grafana Cloud
Synthetic
Monitoring
Grafana Cloud
Frontend
Observability
Grafana
Cloud k6
Real user
monitoring
Synthetic
monitoring
Performance
testing

10. What’s going on?

11. Grafana Frontend Observability

●Measures and records real user journeys as they interact with your app
●Two core components

Grafana Faro
Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability

12. Grafana Frontend Observability
Core Web Vitals
●Core Web Vitals (TTFB, FCP, LCP,
CLS, INP) → speed, stability,
responsiveness

13. Demo: Let’s dig deeper on two problems
Slow loading images Add to cart lag
? !?

15. Frontend
Observability
Performance
Testing
OSS  Cloud)
Synthetic
Monitoring
Observe




Detect

16. How Performance Testing Works

17. Performance
Testing

18. As Code ⚡ CodeLess

19. Test
Load
Test Duration
Smoke tests
Average load tests
Stress tests
Spike tests
Soak tests
Breakpoint tests
Common types of API load tests

20. Test
Load
Test Duration
Smoke tests
Average load tests
Stress tests
Spike tests
Soak tests
Breakpoint tests
Common types of API load tests

21. Performance Testing
OSS ← ?????? ?????? →
Cloud

22. Performance Testing
?????? Convenience / Focus / TTM
?????? Team Collaboration
?????? Continuous testing

23. Demo: Let’s validate a fix using k6
Slow loading images Add to cart lag
? !?

25. Synthetic Monitoring
!
X
DNS
Ping, TCP,
Traceroute
Multi HTTP
X
k6
k6 Browser

27. Multi-step HTTP monitoring
Fetch cart CheckoutAdd to cart

28. Browser Monitoring (k6 Browser)

29. When to use
Synthetic Monitoring vs Performance Testing

30. Continuous Production Monitoring with Synthetics
??????⚡ High Frequency

???????????? Instant Alerting
Banner load
Add to cart
Performance and
functional testing

31. Continuous Performance Testing with k6
pre-release env. production env.
Average load Stress load Nightly test
…
?????? ⚠
??????✅

32. Reactive ⏩ Proactive
“Start simple and test frequently”

33. https://github.com/grafana/quickpizza

Your Turn: Time to Practice!
https://play.grafana.org
QuickPizza Grafana Play

34. Q+A

35. Please complete our webinar survey.
Have more questions?
Join us at community.grafana.com
or Grafana public slack grafana.slack.com
#grafana


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