Grafana Labs acquired K6 Startup, the announcement came on 17th June. K6 startup is developing an open-source load testing solution for engineering teams. Grafana and K6 will collaborate on an integrated service as part of Grafana’s tech stack, allowing users to monitor and link logs, metrics, and traces to diagnose app performance issues, according to the company.
Grafana and K6
“When we first spoke with the team at K6, we were immediately impressed by the incredible similarities between Grafana and K6, including our passion for open source and how they modernized load testing,” Grafana co-founder and CEO Raj Dutt said in a press release. “In the past, load testing required costly infrastructure investments to run, resulting in only the most well-funded efforts reaping the benefits. These days, computing is available on-demand and microservices are ephemeral, so it is far less costly to run test simulations. Because K6 is open source and also has a cloud offering, developers can realize the benefits much more rapidly.”
The founding team of K6 was working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in the year 2000, to support hundreds of players at the same time. When the need for early load testing arose, the team decided to start a consulting firm to help institutions like the European Space Agency.
In 2008, the team decided to commercialize their load testing tool as a website benchmarking tool. K6 also began developing a new open-source load testing tool for automated performance tests in 2016.
“Grafana is the unquestioned leader in the observability space, and they have done an incredible job building an open and composable observability stack for their users — both on the open-source and enterprise fronts,” K6 CEO Robin Gustafasson said. “Joining the Grafana and K6 family will accelerate our ability to give modern engineering teams better ways to observe and build reliable applications.”
This news of Grafana and K6 comes a week after Grafana announced a series of product improvements a week ago, including the general availability of Grafana 8.0 and Grafana Tempo 1.0, as well as additional machine learning features. Grafana’s latest release contains new Grafana Tempo distributed tracing, as well as improved visuals and a unified alerting mechanism.
Observability tools are used by 92% of enterprises, according to VMWare Tanzu, to enable more effective business decision-making. With the vast number of metrics collected on the behavior of distributed app environments, observability tools can provide real-time business insights, generating value for stakeholders.
