Question

I am looking for a service that will support the following:

1. Measure the page load performance from multiple locations around the world (United States, London, India, Phillipines, etc.)
2. Able to authenticate a user
3. Scheduled to run once a month or on demand

I am familiar with Gomez. Are there other services you would recommend?

Answer 1

Have a look at Monitis - they are non-free (although a lot cheaper than Gomez, I expect). I used them a couple of years ago and had a good experience.

Answer 2

I have spent some time researching this topic and we came up with an interim solution that will work for us.

The sticking point for us is that we didn't really want continuous measurements. What we wanted was a set of measurements at a point in time. A month or two later, we would want to re-run the tests.

Gomez is by far the most full featured solution with many different ways to measure performance - from simple site up to detailed object level measurements to supposed "real world" measurements from user's browsers. They also have a large worldwide presence. However, all of this power comes at a cost. As a startup, we could not afford the dollar commitment required by their annual contract.

Another alternative and one that one of our customers use is Website Pulse. They do offer the individual element level performance data at more reasonable price. Their geographical dispersion, while much smaller than Gomez, would work for us. Since one of our customer's was using Website pulse to monitor that our site was up, we decided we wanted to get a different perspective.

After reviewing the suggestion to use Monitis, we spent some more time looking at what we could do with our existing up time monitoring service - Alertra. We were able to use their scripting capabilities to get the initial set of metrics that we are looking for.

Long term, I think we will revisit Gomez or Website Pulse. The pragmatic solution for use today is to get some metrics that are close to what we need.