Getting Started

Request Metrics is the fast and easy way to understand your website and your users. Drop our agent into your HTML markup, and we'll get you simplified metrics about how to make your website better, faster, and more effective. Let's go.

Step 1: Create Your Free Account

Click that pretty blue button in the upper right and create a Request Metrics account. You’ll need to provide some basic details about the website you’ll be monitoring, but you can edit these later if you just want to play around. Your account will be active and ready to use right away.

Step 2: Install the Agent

Tip: If you’re not ready to deploy our agent, check out Step 2 (Install Alternative) for a no-code option

When creating your account, you’ll be prompted to copy the installation snippet. This is a bit of HTML and JavaScript that will install the Request Metrics agent on your website. It looks like this:

<!-- Request Metrics -->
<script>
  (function(t,e,n,r){function a(){return e&&e.now?e.now():null}if(!n.version){n._events=[];n._errors=[];n._metadata={};n._urlGroup=null;window.RM=n;n.install=function(e){n._options=e;var a=t.createElement("script");a.async=true;a.crossOrigin="anonymous";a.src=r;var o=t.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];o.parentNode.insertBefore(a,o)};n.identify=function(t,e){n._userId=t;n._identifyOptions=e};n.sendEvent=function(t,e){n._events.push({eventName:t,metadata:e,time:a()})};n.setUrlGroup=function(t){n._urlGroup=t};n.track=function(t,e){n._errors.push({error:t,metadata:e,time:a()})};n.addMetadata=function(t){n._metadata=Object.assign(n._metadata,t)}}})(document,window.performance,window.RM||{},"https://cdn.requestmetrics.com/agent/current/rm.js");
  RM.install({
      token: "your:token"
  });
</script>

Copy and paste it (replacing “YOUR_SITE_TOKEN”) into your base HTML page. Most people put this in the <head> tag of their page, so they can send custom events in their code. There are lots of options to customize the installation for your specific use case, but this is a great place to start.

Deploy your website so that visitors start including the performance agent with your website.

Step 2 (Install Alternative): Automated Performance Test

If installation isn’t an option right now, or you just want to get moving quickly, you can run an automated test to start gathering data.

Just tell us the URL of the site you want to monitor and our robots will crawl it for 60 minutes, generating a few hundred page views.

This will give you an idea of the kind of data we gather and showcase the product’s featureset without any installation on your part.

Tip: If the automated test isn’t an option because your site requires authentication, check out the Chrome Extension. It will automatically install the agent into any site that you visit. It’s not data from your real users, but it’ll give you a good idea how it works.

Step 3: Check Your Data

Depending how busy your site is, it might be a few minutes or hours until you have interesting data. Check back after you’ve deployed and we’ll surface interesting data and recommendations to you.