Automated Performance Testing with K6

Published in

VNGRS

4 min readDec 31, 2019

Automated testing is running the tests and reporting results by tools with scripts. Automated performance testing is designing the performance test scenarios to run them spontaneously by tools and evaluating the result by tools to decide to go or not to go further.

A subset of the performance test scenarios
Designed to run spontaneously by tools
Designed to evaluate the result by tools
Designed not to break the system
Having decision metrics, ex: max response time, max-average resp time, …
Designed to create reports for the concurrent and historical run

What Types of Performance Testing Should be Automated

Automated performance testing can be applied to all types of performance testing. However, each type needs a different level of maturity and sanity.

Automated Performance Testing is

Easily applied to load testing
Hard to apply stress test, spike test, but have benefits
Very hard to apply Soak-Endurance test

Automated Load Tests

Since the load test is aiming to the response of the system under a specific load and it is a success belongs to the pre-defined metrics, load testing is the best-suited performance testing type.

Automated Load Testing is

Needing a specific load level
Needing pre-defined metrics
Needing evaluation of the result
Needing exactly the same environment — only one thing can be testable
Needing tools and script knowledge
Easy to integrate CI/CD pipeline — everything is scripted
Reporting the performance of the system when something changes

Tools Needed for Automated Performance Testing

Performance testing depends on two main parts. The first part is creating loads and the second part is using these loads for test scenarios. When it comes to doing automated performance testing, we need more tools. The tools needed for automated performance testing can be classified into the following items:

Open-source Performance Testing Tools

Jmeter — Apache project, v1.0 1998
Gatling — Enterprise support by Frontline
K6 — Enterprise support by LoadImpact
Locust
and many others

Commercial Performance Testing Tools

LoadRunner by Microfocus (previously Mercury — HP)
Blazemeter — support multiple opensource tools
LoadUI Pro by Smartbear

Databases

InfluxDB — Opensourced times series database
MongoDB — Opensourced document-based database

Monitoring/Reporting tools

Grafana
Kibana
Graphite

Orchestration Tools

Docker Compose
Kubernetes
Prometheus
Mesosphere DC/OS
And others

Automation Tools

Jenkins
TravisCI
TeamCity
CircleCI
Code Ship
Gitlab CI”

A Way of Implementation of K6 for Automated Performance Testing

K6 is an open-source performance testing tool. It is designed for developers, it gives us many good features to run tests in a safer, faster, easier integrated way. Very easy to integrate it to CI/CD.

Some of the Good Features of K6 are

Precious in performance, among the top 5 in comparison
Written in Golang, allows writing test script in Javascript
Easy to connect to DB (such as InfluxDB)
Easy to create reports (Grafana)

K6 has rich libraries that you can use in the script. The request is sending by HTTP from k6/http. Grouping is letting you run the same kind of request in a group. Check the simple test scripts which have to get requests to the three URLs and post requests to register endpoint with dynamic data.

Command-line supports many parameters to run your scripts. For a load test, we have fixed virtual user and fixed test duration so the run script should look like

For a spike test, we should load the system with a nominal load and the load should increase suddenly. Let’s focus on at the — stage option for this.

K6 can be easily integrated with an InfluxDB instance so in the setup we are also running the docker-compose to create an InfluxDB instance with will use for feeding Grafana dashboard to visualize all the data.

The K6 sends the results to the InfluxDB, we can virtualize this data with Grafana. You can use the dashboard created by the LoadImpact

Add these scripts to your CI/CD pipeline to run an automated performance test and see the result in Jenkins. To see all the scripts and data check this repo on Github