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k6 Cloud / Grafana Integration

Let’s be honest: running tests on your local machine is a clean and safe lab experiment up to a point. But when traffic reaches thousands of users and global complexity, local CPU and network limits quickly become visible.

That is where the k6 Cloud and Grafana combination becomes critical.

7.1 k6 Cloud

When local resources are not enough, k6 Cloud helps, but its value is not only extra CPU.

Global Load (Cloud Execution)

If your audience is global, generating traffic from a single office location is not realistic.

With k6 Cloud, you can apply load from different regions (for example Tokyo and Virginia) and measure latency under true global conditions.

Leaving Infrastructure Labor Behind

You do not need to spend effort on:

  • Docker setup and maintenance
  • Load generator machine health
  • Local environment bottlenecks

k6 Cloud handles infrastructure overhead so teams can focus on results.

Anomaly Detection

k6 Cloud can surface unusual behavior during test execution, not only after test completion. This helps teams detect risk earlier.

7.2 Grafana & Prometheus

Reading only a post-test report is like autopsy. With Grafana integration, monitoring becomes live surgery.

Real-Time Monitoring

During execution, metrics can be streamed to Prometheus and visualized in Grafana in near real-time.

This allows second-by-second visibility instead of delayed analysis.

The Power of Correlation

This is the most valuable part:

  • k6 latency and error metrics
  • Server CPU/RAM metrics
  • Database behavior

Seeing these together helps answer root-cause questions such as:

  • "When response time spikes, is database connection pool saturation happening?"

Historical Comparison

k6 Cloud keeps report history for a limited period, but self-managed Grafana/Prometheus storage can preserve data much longer.

Long-term history is essential for questions like:

  • "How did the system perform during last year’s campaign, and how does it compare today?"