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.

Your organization, irrespective of its size, is likely creating a substantial amount of data, and deriving value and insights from this data is vital. This is where dashboards can assist you. With reporting dashboards, you can cut through the noise, and select the metrics that are pivotal to your team to begin visualizing them and the trend of these metrics through continuous monitoring, enabling your team to acquire actionable insights.

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.

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.