Creating a Budget

Performance Budgets are an effective way of ensuring regressions in performance and user experience can be noticed and addressed quickly. You can set Budgets against every metric in Calibre.

Create a Budget

To create a Budget, navigate to Site → Budgets and click the Add a Budget button. On Add a Budget page, you will be able to select a metric to track and a range of settings for your Budget.

Choose a Metric

Start by selecting a metric to track. Once you choose one, the chart below populates with historical tracking information (if present), and how frequently specific measurements occur. The highest bars mean the most common occurrence, which signifies the average user experience. The chart is re-generated each time you select specific Pages or Test Profiles.

The chart is also colour-coded accordingly to Slow, Average and Fast range recommendations (for timing-based metrics) or Small, Average and Large recommendations (for byte size-based metrics).

With this context, you should be able to select a Budget value that is informed by your use case but also meets recommendations for best performance.

Choose Pages

You can set the same Budget for all, one or a custom selection of Pages within a given Site. Once you choose Select Pages, you will see a list of all Pages in your Site.

Choose Test Profiles

It’s possible to set a single Budget against all Test Profiles in use. You can also set separate Budgets for each Test Profile. Since different Test Profiles produce varying monitoring data, it’s important to track Budgets for them separately.

We recommend setting separate Budgets when dealing with vastly different environment set-ups, such as Desktop with Cable connection, Motorola Moto 3G or disabling ads and third parties.

Choose Notifications

Calibre will notify the creator of the Budget and anyone who subscribes to Budget notifications each time there’s a change in Budget status. You can choose to:

• Receive notifications when there’s a sustained change to the Budget status: You will receive a notification each time there is a persistent change to the overall Budget status. This is useful if you would like to ensure changes in metrics are persisting in the long term instead of observing natural monitoring fluctuations. It will produce fewer notifications but might delay noticing regressions depending on how often tests are run (the more frequent tests are, the faster you will see a notification).
• Receive notifications when any Page changes status: You will receive a notification each time a single Page and Test Profile combination changes status. This is useful if you would like to be notified straight away. It might increase the number of notifications and decrease the accuracy since metrics naturally fluctuate.

View Performance Budgets

To view Budgets, navigate to Site → Budgets page. You can filter Budgets by choosing their status.

After clicking on a Budget card, you will be taken to View Budget page providing more details about Pages and Test Profiles and their Budget status. You will also be able to see who created and edited the Budget, and when.

Edit or Delete a Budget

To edit or delete an existing performance Budget, go to Site → Budgets and click on a relevant Budget card. On the View Budget page, you will be able to Edit or Delete a Budget.