Distributed systems, such as modern microservices-based applications, are highly scalable, but also highly complex. Dependencies and unexpected interactions between services are a common cause of incidents, and these incidents are also notoriously hard to test for. xk6-disruptor — an extension that adds fault injection capabilities to Grafana k6, the open source reliability and load testing tool — can help overcome these challenges.

While we all love open source technology and the community that comes with it, we don’t always have the time or resources to stand up, maintain, update, and troubleshoot a self-hosted stack.

What is Grafana? How do I change the color of a panel set? Where can I find all public dashboards? Who made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

Grafana dashboards are powerful and flexible tools for observing applications and infrastructure, so it’s no surprise we get a lot of questions from the community about how to embed them into their web applications. Over the past few releases, we’ve developed a lot of options for how to do this in Grafana, but there can be confusion about how they work, and when to use each approach.