Competitive analysis and monitoring

I believe there are strong links between web analytics and performance metrics. For example, if you experience a drop in conversion, how do you correlate that with the fact your infrastructure had some problems (performance, network, etc.)?

Another perspective is to be able to do competitive analysis: monitor competitors transactions and detect changes to a single page or a transction.

What I've been looking at recently are solutions such as Gomez, Keynote, Alertsite, Mercury End User Management and a bunch of other lower-end solutions (such as Site24x7 by Zoho).

However, it turns out that most of the tools are made for IT people who want to monitor and establish performance baselines (response time, SSL handshake, DNS resolution, etc.) and get alerted whenever something goes wrong. I have to admit the usability of those solutions is often awkward and not too intuitive.

I will continue to investigate this topic and post updates to my blog. Pending questions are:

• what business tools (vs IT solutions) could be used for external end-to-end performance monitoring?
• what tools could be used for competitive monitoring?
• how to correlate infrastructure performance metrics with web analytics?