Benchmarks often enter into play when you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to respect. The SLA can be more or less explicit. Typically, you may have a very blurry definition of your SLA, such as the application must provide good user experience, or you may have them in a very precise manner in a contract, such as the application must support Black Friday weekend and 10 million users a day, and each user action must be executed in less than one second. There are even some standards to describe the SLA, such as the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) to define how to measure and expose your SLA.
In any case, if an SLA is identified, and even more so if you have some compensation ...
