Set Achievable Budgets, Add Authentication to PR Reviews and More

Release Notes is a monthly summary of new features, product improvements and upcoming releases.

Set meaningful budgets and meet them

We completely revamped performance budgets to guide you in setting thresholds based on recommended values and your context. With new Budgets, you’re able to see all of your targets with their current status in one place—the Budgets dashboard.

When creating a Budget, Calibre will now showcase the desirable value ranges alongside your past measurements. That way, you can make an informed decision about what’s achievable in the short term, and where would you like to be in the long term. We take out the laborious process of guessing what a good metric value should be.

You can also view your Budgets and see historical data for each Page and Test Profile combination. By doing so, you will be able to easily spot outliers that might need separate thresholds or identify where more performance work is required to meet your goals.

As always, Calibre will notify you about the status of your budgets through email and Slack, based on a selected frequency. In Budgets 2.0, we also identify at-risk values, so you know when a metric is close to exceeding the budget and can address it before it happens.

Read more about what’s new in Budgets and learn how to set them up.

Log into your Sites with password only

If you’re testing Sites that require authentication, you can do so without providing the username and rely solely on the password. We know authentication comes in various shapes and forms, thus providing the username to the Calibre Test Agent is now optional.

You can always adjust your authentication settings in Site → Settings → Agent Settings.

Add authentication to Pull Request Reviews

If your deployment previews are password protected and you’re using Pull Request Reviews, you can now add authentication settings to your config.yml to access those environments. Those authentication settings will only be used for Pull Request Reviews tests. You can still specify separate authentication methods for your scheduled and API-invoked Snapshots.

Lighthouse 6.1.1

Our Test Agents now use the latest Lighthouse release, 6.1.1. As always, we upgrade to stable Lighthouse releases as they become available so that you can leverage the newest version.

New documentation: Why do my tests fail guide

We documented the most common reasons for test failures, so you can prevent ongoing disruptions to your monitoring. Now, when your tests fail to complete, you will be able to easier debug why and address the underlying issues.

Upcoming releases: New design for Performance Newsletter and other mailings

We’re splashing a fresh coat of paint on all of our mailings, including Performance Newsletter. Perf Email is a go-to newsletter for anyone interested in performance and user experience. In each email, we curate up-to-date articles, case studies, tools, podcasts and more. Sign up here to receive the next issue.

We’re also refreshing how we communicate feature releases and improvements to Calibre. If you’d like to know what’s new and stay in touch with our performance writing, sign up to our Product mailing list.

Karolina Szczur

Karolina is the Product Design Lead at Calibre. With years of design experience under her belt, she’s responsible for the comprehensive user experience spanning over product, visuals and content. Find her on Twitter or LinkedIn.