Editor’s note: This blog post is the second in a series of posts about organizing your performance testing suite with Grafana k6. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first post in the series, which explores how to implement reusable test patterns and other best practices within your testing suite.

Here at Grafana Labs, we have a long-standing commitment to helping our users understand how their applications and services behave from an external point of view. This critical practice — known as synthetic monitoring — has been a key focus of ours for nearly a decade. Back in 2015, we released worldPing, our first product to help measure the user experience and improve website performance.

In 2017, we open sourced Grafana k6 and made its first beta available to everyone. This wasn’t our first rodeo — k6 marked the third load testing tool our team had developed over a decade. We had recognized the gaps in existing solutions, as well as the barriers that were hindering adoption in the developer community. The plan was simple yet ambitious: let’s build a tool developers actually enjoy using and that helps engineering teams build more reliable software.

Sometimes, the little things can make a big difference. We’ve added a new feature in Grafana Incident & Response Management (IRM) that lets you sync your Google Calendar out-of-office events with Grafana OnCall.

When deploying an application using Kubernetes, you get used to all your resources being manageable by describing them to the Kubernetes API. Whether it’s deployments, secrets, configurations, or entire machines, everything exists as code somewhere. Introducing a cloud service into such an environment often means introducing additional ways to configure it, which can become cumbersome, given the rising number of cloud services modern applications depend on.

“Okay,” said Bryan Boreham, distinguished engineer at Grafana Labs, as he took to the stage at GopherCon 2023 in September. “Who loves algorithms?” A room full of software engineers raised their hands in response — and with that, Bryan kicked off his talk at the annual event dedicated to the Go open source programming language. GopherCon 2023, which took place in San Diego, Calif.

At this point, the technical and operational benefits of cloud computing are pretty much indisputable. But the cloud industry, as a whole, still has a long way to go in one critical area: sustainability. In fact, as shocking as it may sound, it’s estimated that cloud data centers have a greater carbon footprint than the entire aviation industry. Ida Fürjesová and Niki Manoledaki, both software engineers at Grafana Labs, are passionate about helping to change that.

The Grafana OnCall mobile app is an essential tool for on-call engineers to monitor and respond to critical system events. Available for both iOS and Android, the app offers a range of features and notification settings that make the on-call experience easier and more intuitive — all in the palm of your hand.

OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key open source tool in the observability space. And as organizations use it to manage more of their telemetry data, they also need to understand how to make it work across their various environments. This guide is focused on scaling the OpenTelemetry Collector deployment across various Linux hosts to function as both gateways and agents within your observability architecture.

We are consistently releasing helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). This month is no exception.