Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a stream-processing platform for handling real-time data. Using xk6-output-kafka extension, you can send k6 metrics in real-time to Kafka, and, optionally, ingest them from InfluxDB.

Build the k6 version

To build a k6 binary with the extension, first, ensure you have installed Go and Git; the following steps are:

# Install xk6
go install go.k6.io/xk6/cmd/xk6@latest

# Build the k6 binary
xk6 build --with github.com/grafana/xk6-output-kafka

... [INFO] Build environment ready
... [INFO] Building k6
... [INFO] Build complete: ./k6

xk6 will create the k6 binary in the local folder.

To learn more about how to build custom k6 versions, check out xk6

Run the k6 test

You can configure the broker (or multiple ones), topic and message format directly from the command line parameter like this:

$ k6 run --out xk6-kafka=brokers=broker_host:8000,topic=k6

or if you want multiple brokers:

--out xk6-kafka=brokers={broker1,broker2},topic=k6,format=json

You can also specify the message format k6 will use. By default, it will be the same as the JSON output, but you can also use the InfluxDB line protocol for direct "consumption" by InfluxDB:

--out xk6-kafka=brokers=someBroker,topic=someTopic,format=influxdb

You can even modify some of the format settings such as tagsAsFields:

--out xk6-kafka=brokers=someBroker,topic=someTopic,format=influxdb,influxdb.tagsAsFields={url,myCustomTag}

Options

Here is the full list of options that can be configured and passed to the extension:

Read more

• xk6-output-kafka extension
• Integrating k6 with Apache Kafka