Establishing website performance benchmarks through competitor comparison
You are responsible for your organization's website performance. You have been asked to establish service level agreements (SLAs) for the performance and availability of your website, but aren't sure what SLAs would be appropriate. Examining competitor's websites and looking at their performance and availability could be a good start to give you a starting point in benchmarking your own SLAs.
How to use Splunk software for this use case
This feature is only available in the Rigor platform. Synthetics users (regardless of platform) can still benchmark against competitors if they create synthetic tests on their competitor sites, and pull the results into custom dashboard charts to compare to their own performance.
You can use Splunk Synthetic Monitoring to set up benchmark checks to compare the performance of different pages. Typically, you'd want to compare your homepage performance to the homepages of your competitors.
- Open Splunk Synthetic Monitoring and click Benchmark.
- Click New.
- In the New Benchmark Check menu, enter the following details:
- A name for the check that describes what you're checking (e.g. "Competitor homepage check")
- The name of your own URL that you will use a basis for the competitor checks (e.g. "Our homepage")
- Your own URL
- Click Add Comparison to add names and URLs for competitor sites to compare against your URL.
- Click Create to set up the check.
After it is created, the Benchmark check updates automatically once per day and compares competitor websites to determine appropriate SLAs.
Next steps
These Splunk resources might help you understand and implement this use case:
- Getting Started Guide: Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
- Use case: Identifying slowly loading web pages