QuickPizza

• What is QuickPizza? 🍕🍕🍕
• Requirements
• Use k6 to test QuickPizza
• Run locally with Docker
• Run and observe locally with Grafana OSS 🐳📊
  • Send k6 Test Results to Prometheus and visualize them in Grafana with prebuilt dashboards
• Run locally and observe with Grafana Cloud ☁📊
  • QuickPizza deployment modes: Monolithic vs Microservices
  • Monitor QuickPizza with Grafana Cloud Application and Frontend Observability
  • Send k6 test results to Grafana Cloud Prometheus and visualize them with prebuilt Grafana dashboards

What is QuickPizza? 🍕🍕🍕

QuickPizza is a simple web application, used for demonstrations and workshops, that generates new and exciting pizza combinations!

You can run QuickPizza locally or deploy it to your own infrastructure. For demo purposes, QuickPizza is also publicly available at:

1. quickpizza.grafana.com— Use this environment to run small-scale performance tests like the ones in the k6 folder.
2. quickpizza-demo.grafana.fun — Install the SRE Demo environment to observe this deployment, or explore it in Grafana Play.

The QuickPizza tests showcase key k6 features, from basic usage to custom modules and extensions.

Requirements

The requirements for QuickPizza depend on your intended use—whether you want to run k6 tests for performance testing, or enable observability with a local or Grafana Cloud observability stack.

• Grafana k6 (v1.0.0 or higher) to run the k6 tests used in this project to test QuickPizza.
• Docker to run QuickPizza locally.
• Docker Compose to run and instrument QuickPizza, storing metrics, logs, traces, and profiling data using the Grafana Observability stack. You can either store this data locally or send it to Grafana Cloud.

Use k6 to test QuickPizza

All tests live in the k6 folder. Within this folder, you will find the following folders:

• foundations - covers the basic functionalities of k6.
• browser - covers the k6 browser module for browser and web performance testing.
• extensions - covers basic tests using k6 extensions.

To run tests on the foundations folder, you can use the following commands:

cd k6/foundations
k6 run 01.basic.js

If QuickPizza is publicly available , then pass the hostname and port through the BASE_URL environment variable as follows:

k6 run -e BASE_URL=https://quickpizza.grafana.com 01.basic.js

Using k6 extensions

If the test uses an extension, you need to build a k6 binary that includes the required extension/s. For detailed instructions, refer to k6 docs:

• Build a k6 binary using Go
• Build a k6 binary using Docker

cd k6/extensions

xk6 build --with xk6-internal=../internal

To run the test that uses the k6/x/internal module, use previously created k6 binary in the k6/extensions folder:

./k6 run 01.basic-internal.js

Using k6 Docker image

If you want to use the [k6 Docker image](https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/k6) to run k6, you need to run the QuickPizza and k6 containers within the same network.

First, create a Docker network. Then, run QuickPizza, assigning a hostname and connecting to the created network.

docker network create quickpizza_network
docker run --network=quickpizza_network --hostname=quickpizza --rm -it -p 3333:3333  ghcr.io/grafana/quickpizza-local:latest

Next, you can use the k6 Docker image to execute the k6 test. Run the k6 Docker container within the same network (quickpizza_network) and pass the BASE_URL environment variable with the value of the QuickPizza container's hostname as follows:

docker run -i --network=quickpizza_network -e BASE_URL=http://quickpizza:3333 grafana/k6 run  - <01.basic.js

Run locally with Docker

To run the app locally with Docker, run the command:

docker run --rm -it -p 3333:3333  ghcr.io/grafana/quickpizza-local:latest

or build image from the repo:

docker run --rm -it -p 3333:3333 $(docker build -q .)

That's it!

Now you can go to localhost:3333 and get some pizza recommendations!

Testing something you can't observe is only half the fun! 🔍✨ QuickPizza is instrumented using best practices to record logs, emit metrics, traces and allow profiling. Get ready to dive deep into observability! 🚀

Run and observe locally with Grafana OSS 🐳📊

The compose.grafana-local-stack.monolithic.yaml file is set up to run and orchestrate the QuickPizza, Grafana, Tempo, Loki, Prometheus, Pyroscope, and Grafana Alloy containers.

Grafana Alloy collects traces, metrics, logs and profiling data from the QuickPizza app, forwarding them to the Tempo, Prometheus and Loki. Finally, you can visualize and correlate data stored in these containers with the locally running Grafana instance.

To start the local environment with the complete observability stack, use the following command:

docker compose -f compose.grafana-local-stack.monolithic.yaml up -d

This setup runs QuickPizza in monolithic mode, where all QuickPizza components run in a single instance.

Like before, QuickPizza is available at localhost:3333. It's time to discover some fancy pizzas!

Then, you can visit the Grafana instance running at localhost:3000 and use Explore or Drilldown apps to access QuickPizza data.

To find the labels applied to the telemetry data, refer to local.alloy and compose.grafana-local-stack.monolithic.yaml.

Send k6 Test Results to Prometheus and visualize them in Grafana with prebuilt dashboards

To send k6 results to the Prometheus instance, execute the k6 run command with the value of the output flag set to experimental-prometheus-rw as follows:

k6 run -o experimental-prometheus-rw 01.basic.js

The local Grafana instance includes the k6 Prometheus and k6 Prometheus (Native Histogram) dashboards to help visualize, query, and correlate k6 results with telemetry data.

For detailed instructions about the different options of the k6 Prometheus output, refer to the k6 output guide for Prometheus remote write.

Run locally and observe with Grafana Cloud ☁📊

The compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml file is set up to run QuickPizza in microservice mode with a Grafana Alloy instance.

In this setup, Grafana Alloy collects observability data from the QuickPizza microservices and forwards it to Grafana Cloud.

You will need the following settings:

1. The name of the Grafana Cloud Stack where the telemetry data will be stored.
2. An Access Policy Token that includes the following scopes for the selected Grafana Cloud Stack: stacks:read, metrics:write, logs:write, traces:write, and profiles:write.

Then, create an .env file with the following environment variables and the values of the previous settings:

# Your Grafana Cloud Stack Name (Slug)
GRAFANA_CLOUD_STACK=
# Your Grafana Cloud Access Policy Token
GRAFANA_CLOUD_TOKEN=

Finally, execute the Docker Compose command using the compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml file, just as in the local setup:

docker compose -f compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml up -d

QuickPizza is available at localhost:3333. Click the Pizza, Please! button and discover some awesome pizzas!

Now, you can log in to Grafana Cloud and use Explore or Drilldown apps to access QuickPizza's telemetry data.

To find the labels applied to the telemetry data, refer to cloud.alloy and compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml.

QuickPizza deployment modes: Monolithic vs Microservices

QuickPizza can be deployed in two modes: monolithic or microservices.

In microservices mode, QuickPizza is split into several independent services, each with a distinct responsibility—such as catalog, recommendations, and public-api. Each service runs in its own Docker container.

This architecture enables distributed tracing and demonstrates service-oriented observability.

graph TB
  subgraph "QuickPizza microservices"
    
   subgraph public-api-svc [public-api service]
      API[/gateway component/]
      FR[/frontend component/]
    end

    copy-svc[copy service]
    rec-svc[recommendations service]
    cfg-svc[config service]
    ws-svc[ws service]

    subgraph catalog-svc [catalog service]
      CA[/catalog component/]
      US[/users component/]
      AD[/admin component/]
    end
    
    DB[(db)]
  end
  GA[Alloy]
  GC[Grafana Cloud<br/>Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope]
  
  
  User --> FR
  API_Client --> API
  FR --> API
  API --> copy-svc
  API --> rec-svc
  API --> cfg-svc
  API --> ws-svc
  API --> CA
  API --> US
  API --> AD

  copy-svc --> DB
  catalog-svc --> DB
  
  public-api-svc <--> GA
  catalog-svc <--> GA
  copy-svc <--> GA
  rec-svc <--> GA
  cfg-svc <--> GA
  ws-svc <--> GA
  GA --> GC

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The compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml file configures QuickPizza in microservices mode. In this setup, Grafana Alloy collects telemetry data from each service and sends it to Grafana Cloud, enabling centralized observability across all components.

For monolithic deployments, all QuickPizza components run together in a single container. Grafana Alloy still collects telemetry data, but from the unified application instance. Use the compose.grafana-cloud.monolithic.yaml or compose.grafana-local-stack.monolithic.yaml files to orchestrate this environment.

Monitor QuickPizza with Grafana Cloud Application and Frontend Observability

The Docker Compose setup is fully instrumented out of the box, so you can jump right into Grafana Cloud Observability apps and start observing the inner workings of the QuickPizza service components.

To enable Grafana Cloud Application Observability for QuickPizza:

1. In your Grafana Cloud instance, navigate to Observability > Application.
2. Click on Enable metrics generation to enable the usage of Application Observability.
3. Interact with the QuickPizza app to generate traffic. After a few minutes, the QuickPizza components will be automatically discovered and displayed in the UI.

To enable Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability:

1. In Grafana Cloud, create a new Frontend Observability application and set the domain to http://localhost:3333.

2. Copy the application's Faro web URL.

3. In your .env file, add the following environment variables to configure your Faro URL and application name:

   # FRONTEND OBSERVABILITY URL
   QUICKPIZZA_CONF_FARO_URL=
   
   # FRONTEND OBSERVABILITY APPLICATION NAME
   QUICKPIZZA_CONF_FARO_APP_NAME=

4. Restart the compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml environment:

   docker compose -f compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml down
   docker compose -f compose.grafana-cloud.microservices.yaml up -d

Send k6 test results to Grafana Cloud Prometheus and visualize them with prebuilt Grafana dashboards

Just like in the local setup, we can output k6 result metrics to a Prometheus instance; in this case, it is provided by our Grafana Cloud Stack.

K6_PROMETHEUS_RW_USERNAME=USERNAME \
K6_PROMETHEUS_RW_PASSWORD=API_KEY \
K6_PROMETHEUS_RW_SERVER_URL=REMOTE_WRITE_ENDPOINT \
k6 run -o experimental-prometheus-rw script.js

For detailed instructions, refer to the k6 output guide for Grafana Cloud Prometheus.