Senior Software Engineer Łukasz Gut talks about a new feature: Distributed Tracing with Grafana Cloud k6. He discusses what distributed tracing is, why it matters, and how it can help teams find reliability issues faster. He is joined by Developer Advocates Marie Cruz and Nicole van der Hoeven.

Quick video on distributed tracing: https://www.youtube.com/watch
The k6 and Tempo integration (k6 Office Hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch
More on distributed tracing for testing using Tracetest (Grafana Office Hours): https://www.youtube.com/watch

⏰ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Introductions

04:40 Grafana announcements

06:12 What is distributed tracing, and what are traces and spans?

13:33 Analogy of a car to explain tracing

16:22 Why should we care about tracing?

23:24 Evolution of distributed tracing due to complex architectures

30:17 How does distributed tracing work in k6?

37:21 Demo of distributed tracing with Grafana Cloud k6 (setting up the test locally)

47:59 Community question - what improvement would I get from switching to distributed tracing with k6?

51:15 Demo of distributed tracing with Grafana Cloud k6 (running the test in Grafana Cloud k6)

59:44 Benefit of distributed tracing from a tester's perspective
1:03:11 Demo of how you can use distributed tracing to identify improvements in your application
1:04:45 Community question - displaying single trace in Grafana from multi-clusters
1:07:42 What is Tracetest's approach to distributed tracing, and how is it different from how k6 does it?
1:10:09 Are there plans to support distributed tracing in k6 browser module?
1:12:47 How can people get started with distributed tracing with Grafana Cloud k6?

Contact Nicole:
Mastodon: https://pkm.social/@nicole
GitHub: https://github.com/nicolevanderhoeven
Site: https://nicolevanderhoeven.com

Contact Marie:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcruzdrake
Site: https://www.testingwithmarie.com/

Contact Łukasz:
GitHub: https://github.com/Blinkuu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blinku/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/blinku_dev

Learn more about Grafana Labs:
Website: https://grafana.com
Repo: https://github.com/grafana/grafana