How can you tell if your systems are reliable when under load? A common answer is to open your observability dashboards, wait for a high-traffic event (like Black Friday), and cross your fingers. While this approach is certainly effective, it's far from ideal. Without proactive reliability and load testing, we have no idea if a system will hold up to real-world usage patterns, which could mean a production outage at the worst possible time.

At ObservabilityCON, we announced our first step towards launching a native integration between Grafana k6 load testing and Grafana Tempo tracing (k6 x Tempo) in Grafana Cloud. We created k6 x Tempo to help dev, testing, and operation teams analyze their performance test results more effectively and proactively improve the reliability of their business-critical applications.

Testing early and often in the development cycle is a must for ensuring that your application meets user expectations. Poor performance and errors can alienate users and prevent you from meeting crucial benchmarks and OKRs. Additionally, having to constantly implement fixes after new, under-tested features are added can fatigue developers and strain your resources, making your organization less nimble overall.

Welcome to day three of our very first Launch Week! The last two days we shared how alerting became so much better and how we moved one level up by completing our SOC 2 Type 1 audit. Are you curious what’s next? I’ll tell you, but first let’s set the stage and look at Microsoft’s Playwright.