GitLab/k6 integration deprecated

Grafana k6 OSS Support
1

Hello team,

Today I stumbled upon a warning in the GitLab docs that the “Load Performance Testing” (using k6) was deprecated in GitLab and will be removed:

Load Performance Testing (deprecated) PREMIUM
Introduced in GitLab 13.2.
This feature was deprecated in GitLab 15.9 and is planned for removal in 17.0. This change is a breaking change.

I’m not a DevOps guy so I’m not sure of the ramifications here. The GitLab doc mentions this “Load Performance report artifact” of being created and used as a comparison against a prior test, showing metrics between the source and target branches in the “merge request widget” but we are not using that.

Does any specific action need to be taken? Will we still be able to use the docker version of k6 in our GitLab environments as per this writeup?

3

Hi @richmarshall

For the GitLab deprecation warning ramifications you should probably contact the GitLab team. What has been deprecated a the feature GitLab build on top of OSS k6.

In any way, as you well mention, you could replace the GitLab feature with a k6 stage as described in Load testing with GitLab. E.g.:

loadtest-local:
  image:
    name: grafana/k6:latest
    entrypoint: ['']
  stage: loadtest-local
  script:
    - echo "executing local k6 in k6 container..."
    - k6 run ./loadtests/performance-test.js

You should be able to test if there are any implications in your case when replacing this. You mention you were not using the integrated metrics, etc., though worth double-checking and reaching out to GitLab in case there are missing features.

Cheers!

5

Thanks @eyeveebe that’s essentially what our stages look like and we are relying on multiple thresholds that vary according to the test script. I suppose I can take the implementation of the GitLab feature off of my to-do list. :grinning: Re-reading the page, I don’t think it actually shows how to use the data to control pass vs. fail; it appears to simply highlights change from the last run.

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