How Gatling Works
From code to dashboards, Gatling gives you the flexibility to test fast, simulate real traffic, and make confident decisions, without slowing delivery.
Worldwide community of 300,000 companies and millions of users
“Gatling Enterprise has been a game-changer for our performance testing. The ability to simulate real-world loads and automatically test our platform’s response to high traffic has ensured that we maintain top performance, even as our business grows.”
Pierre Pommerel
Sonepar
Gatling SDK’s
Precise performance modeling at code speed.
Custom scenarios
Build rich user journeys with full control over flow, data, loops, conditions, and error handling.
Flexible load models
Define open (arrival rate) or closed (concurrency) workload patterns, combine phases, or generate complex traffic curves.
Dynamic checks
Validate response payloads, extract session data, chain requests, using JSONPath, XPath, JMESPath, regex, and more.
Performance assertions
Set pass/fail thresholds on latency, success rate, or throughput, per scenario or globally
High-scale & Resource efficient Load generation
Massive-scale load generation without massive cloud bills
Gatling’s asynchronous, event-driven architecture can simulate millions of users while using a fraction of the CPU and memory of traditional thread-per-user tools. This efficiency translates directly into lower infrastructure costs: you can run the same tests with fewer machines, or push to higher concurrency without blowing up your budget.
Built for FinOps-conscious teams
Pay only for what you use: Load injectors spin up on demand and automatically shut down when tests finish, eliminating idle costs.
Smaller compute footprint: Event-driven virtual users reduce the number and size of machines needed.
Cloud-agnostic scaling: Deploy across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, or on-prem while keeping spend predictable.
With Gatling, organizations regularly simulate over 2 million concurrent users, achieving aggressive load testing goals with optimized infrastructure.
Powerful, distributed load injection
Gatling makes horizontal scaling simple, letting you run distributed load tests across cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments:
Deploy load generators on Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, or your own infrastructure
Test across all of your environments and multiple cloud providers
Overcome single-machine limitations with distributed injection
Real-time performance insights with structured, actionable data
Detailed reports for every simulation
Each simulation run generates a report with raw and computed data. While our Community Edition delivers a standalone HTML report; Enterprise Edition offers live dashboards, multi-run comparisons, and trend analysis across test campaigns.
Fully readable, structured performance data
Gatling doesn’t hide your data behind a black box. You get full transparency with structured metrics that directly reflect your test logic, making it easier to debug, share, and improve your performance testing strategy.
Real-time insights from high-frequency metrics
Gatling captures performance data through a high-frequency, event-driven metrics engine. Every request, response, and virtual user event is processed on the fly, bucketed into time-series data, and scoped across requests, groups, scenarios, and global KPIs.
Live test visibility while the run is in progress
Because data is streamed (not batch-collected) you get instant feedback on spikes in latency, error bursts, and throughput variations. Percentiles (p50, p95, p99) and active users evolve in real time, helping you catch issues as they happen.
Explore how Gatling visualizes results
Write tests in your IDE
Use the tools you already know:
Develop simulations in IntelliJ, Eclipse, VS Code, or your favorite IDE
Build and package with Maven, Gradle, sbt, or npm
Treat load tests like code: versioned, reviewed, and traceable
Commit and version in Git
Use the tools you already know:
Store scripts in GitHub, GitLab, or any Git provider
Review tests via pull requests
Use CI to validate and trigger them automatically
Automate in CI/CD
Run tests on every commit, merge, or release:
Native plugins for GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, and more
Monitor and alert in real time
Bring load testing into your observability stack:
Push metrics to Datadog or Dynatrace
Send alerts to Slack, Teams, or any webhook
Catch regressions before they reach users
Turn load testing
into a competitive advantage.
Integrate into your CI/CD pipeline, simulate real-world traffic, and deploy with confidence.
CONTINUITY
Shift left. Shift right.
One platform for both.
Gatling enables performance testing throughout the software lifecycle early in development (Shift Left) and during staging or production readiness (Shift Right). Teams can reuse the same scripts, environments, and workflows without switching tools.
Run load tests locally or in lightweight CI pipelines
Validate APIs, services, and user journeys as code evolves
Integrate performance assertions alongside functional test requirements
Identify regressions immediately after code changes, not after release
Simulate heavy, multi-region traffic with distributed load generators
Test complex, real-world scenarios as part of staging, pre-production, or production workflows.
Track performance trends across builds and deployments
Stress test APIs, infrastructure, and backend systems under realistic conditions
Smart infrastructure for high-scale load testing
Gatling launches distributed load generators on demand (from your cloud, Kubernetes clusters, or on-prem) with zero manual setup or teardown. As soon as your test finishes, infrastructure is automatically deprovisioned, saving you from idle costs and manual ops work. Load injectors pull simulations, execute them, and stream live metrics back to Gatling Enterprise, all with outbound-only access for secure, automated scaling.
Version-controlled, pipeline-ready infrastructure
Put your performance test environments under version control. Gatling supports Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, and CDK—so your load testing infrastructure can evolve alongside your codebase and CI/CD pipelines.
Ready to move beyond local tests?
Start building a performance strategy that scales with your business.
Need technical references and tutorials?
Minimal features, for local use only
