Just had a mind-blowing moment while stress-testing a new dashboard I built in Metabase. I was worried about how it would hold up if our whole team jumped on at once, but I don't have a budget for fancy load-testing services.
Turns out, you can simulate dozens (even hundreds!) of concurrent users hitting your BI tool with a completely free and open-source tool called **k6**. I used it to simulate 50 virtual users poking at a complex Looker Studio report for 5 minutes, and it was shockingly easy to set up.
Here’s the basic idea of what I did:
* Wrote a simple script that defines the HTTP requests (like loading the report, filtering data).
* Used k6's cloud execution (their free tier is generous) to ramp up the virtual users.
* Got back clear metrics on response times, failures, and requests per second.
It was a game-changer for identifying a slow-running query that would have only surfaced during a busy Monday morning. This is perfect for anyone rolling out a self-serve analytics tool and wanting to avoid performance surprises.
Has anyone else tried k6 or similar tools (like Locust) for testing their embedded analytics or internal dashboards? I'm curious about your setup and what kind of thresholds you're aiming for.