Company
Date Published
Author
Peter Schretlen
Word count
2311
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Grafana Labs has enhanced its Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring service to simulate complex user journeys and transactions, aiming to improve end-user experience by utilizing the capabilities of Grafana k6. This evolution includes the introduction of two new check types, MultiHTTP and Scripted, which allow users to create multi-step tests and define workflow tests in JavaScript, respectively. These new features enable developers, platform engineers, and site reliability engineers to monitor complex transactions beyond protocol-level tests, which were previously limited to the Prometheus blackbox exporter. The integration of k6 offers a robust solution with a high-performance JavaScript engine and a scripting API, allowing for comprehensive synthetic monitoring by simulating real application traffic. Moreover, it supports HTTP, WebSockets, and gRPC protocols, and includes built-in metrics and custom logs for troubleshooting. Users can automate the setup and maintenance of checks, activate alerts, and visualize results through built-in dashboards. The service is designed to be adaptable for load testing and performance insights, promising further enhancements, such as the incorporation of the k6-browser module, to expand its capabilities. Grafana Cloud offers a free tier with significant test executions, making it accessible for users to start with synthetic monitoring.