Request Metrics vs. SpeedCurve by Embrace

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

Website performance monitoring:

• Setting performance targets and alerts
• Investigating performance degradation (including data stored before the issue was detected)
• Improving the team's performance awareness and knowledge

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• Store performance checks
• User interface is great to help analyse the data
• Simple yet effective interface
• Offer some insights and other tools to help make sense of the data

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

• The interface has some confusing points, for instance aggregation setting (percentiles, median) is misleading, and doesn't do anything in some cases
• Some additional statistical tools would super charge the charts and alerts: moving average, some more useful trend lines
• The performance charts are amazing to compare many values (from different pages, multiple metrics) and find correlations. But the charts are barely usable when many metrics are shown (one cannot tell a line from the other). A simple UI improvement there could supercharge this use case

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

SpeedCurve actually uses many of those standard tests, and stores the information from test runs indefinitely. This is the game changer.

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget

• Speedcurve facilitates and empowers performance improvements that lead the higher conversion rates, user engagement and ultimately GMV
• Through it's interface and automation, Speed curve saves hundreds of hours in investigations around performance issues
• By facilitating performance analysis and knowledge sharing, SpeedCurve allows our teams to be more performance-aware, preventing performance issues from even happening

Incentivized