Grafana Labs acquires load-testing startup K6

Observability platform Grafana Labs today announced it has acquired K6, a Stockholm-headquartered startup that’s building an open source load testing tool for engineering teams. Grafana says it and K6 will work together on an integrated offering as part of Grafana’s tech stack, providing a way to monitor and connect logs, metrics, and traces to diagnose app performance issues.

“When we first spoke with the team at K6, we were immediately impressed by the incredible similarities between them and Grafana, including our passion for open source and how they modernized load testing,” Grafana cofounder and CEO Raj Dutt said in a press release. “In the past, load testing required costly infrastructure investments to run, resulting in only the most well-funded efforts reaping the benefits. These days, compute is available on demand and microservices are ephemeral, so it is far less costly to run test simulations. Because K6 is open source and also has a cloud offering, developers can realize the benefits much more rapidly.”

In 2000, K6’s founding team was working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), with the goal of supporting hundreds of players simultaneously. The need for early load testing arose, and the team opted to open a consultancy to support organizations including the European Space Agency. In 2008, the team pivoted to bring its load testing tool to market as a website benchmarking product. And in 2016, K6 started working on a new open source load testing tool for automating performance tests.

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