What Is Real User Monitoring?

• Real User Monitoring Definition

  Real User Monitoring Definition

  Real user monitoring is a type of web monitoring that records users’ interactions with a website or web application and provides visibility into end-user experience issues.
• How Does Real User Monitoring Work?

  How Does Real User Monitoring Work?

  RUM inserts a small JavaScript code on every page of your website that automatically triggers when a user visits the site and reports back on the page load data and other performance metrics. This data is based on actual user interactions, allowing you to identify and optimize website areas requiring immediate attention to improve the end-user experience.
• Real User Monitoring Benefits

  Real User Monitoring Benefits

  Some important benefits of RUM include:

  • Improved Customer Experience: RUM solutions gather real-time transaction data helpful in understanding the behavior of web visitors; without sampling your data, it can help you identify how and where your users access your site and understand who is affected by outages or poor user experiences 
  • Enhanced Visibility: RUM investigates a website from the customers’ perspective to detect and report unexpected issues such as page load performance across different geographies and browser types; having such granular visibility into app performance can help eradicate hard-to-detect problems quickly before they reach end users and bring down your revenue
  • Higher Productivity: Manual detection of website performance and usability issues is often time- and resource-intensive; RUM tools can automatically detect website performance problems, allowing developers to fix them rapidly without additional efforts
  • Cost Optimization: Real user monitoring assists in resource optimization by identifying performance bottlenecks and errors, allowing for more effective allocation of infrastructure and development resources, which ultimately reduces costs
  • Enhanced Conversion Rates and Revenue: By quickly identifying and fixing performance issues in critical user paths (such as checkout), RUM directly leads to higher conversion rates, improved customer retention, and increased overall revenue
• Real User Monitoring Metrics

  Real User Monitoring Metrics

  Outlined below are some of the vital metrics monitored by real user monitoring tools.

  The user satisfaction score, or Apdex, is a numerical indicator determining the user contentment level with the performance of a web application.

  Page load time indicates the total average duration a webpage takes to appear on a client’s browser. RUM tools can display the actual load times with various filters, such as user location, browser, and device type.

  The active users metric shows the number of live connections to a website for a given period. With RUM solutions, you can easily track this number for effective site monitoring.

  Connection requests denote the total number of HTTP requests directed toward a particular web server for accessing site content.

  The bounce rate represents the percentage of online users who abandon a website immediately after landing on one of its pages. This is one of the critical metrics to track user engagement on a website.

  Top pages can help determine frequently visited pages on a website. These pages often bring high-value conversions and must be optimized accordingly.

  Top platforms enable you to monitor and improve your website performance across desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.
• Real User Monitoring versus Synthetic Monitoring

  Real User Monitoring versus Synthetic Monitoring

  Both RUM and synthetic monitoring are crucial to effective application performance monitoring (APM). Businesses often use these techniques together to obtain meaningful results. However, they often struggle to understand the differences between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. Let’s explore them in detail.

  RUM is a type of passive web monitoring. It relies on technology to track and analyze website or application performance in the background, including availability, usability, and responsiveness. This approach requires a decent amount of traffic or a high number of page views before surfacing significant results related to web application performance in the real world or client environment with varying browsers, devices, networks, and geolocations. Understanding long-term performance trends is more straightforward with RUM by analyzing current and past application usage patterns.

  Synthetic monitoring, in contrast, takes a proactive approach to website monitoring by running automated scripts simulating real user activities to track and eliminate short-term performance issues during application development. Additionally, synthetic monitoring enables quality assurance teams to test an application before its release. It’s handy for high-traffic websites where early testing can help retain users and minimize revenue losses due to application errors. However, simulating every real-world scenario is practically impossible due to various environmental factors, such as the user’s device, network speed, and geolocation. RUM can help fill this gap by offering more visibility into actual user experiences.
• Criteria for Selecting Real User Monitoring Tools

  Criteria for Selecting Real User Monitoring Tools

  1. Core Functionality and Performance Metrics

  Data Capture and Sampling: You must determine if the tool captures 100% of user sessions (full fidelity) or if it relies on data sampling. Full fidelity is critical for debugging rare issues, as heavy sampling can hide problems affecting small but important user segments.

  Key Performance Indicators: The tool must accurately track and report modern, relevant metrics such as core web vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift). It should also monitor classic metrics such as time to first byte, page load time, and network request timing.

  Error and Crash Detection: Look for robust features that automatically detect, report, and provide deep contextual detail for JavaScript errors, network failures, and application crashes. This context should include the stack trace and the exact moment and state of the application when the error occurred.

  Session Replay Capability:
  The ability to visually recreate a user’s journey—including clicks, scrolls, form interactions, and network activity—is invaluable for true root cause analysis. Ensure the replay is accurate and respects user privacy through data masking.

  Minimal Performance Overhead: The RUM agent (the snippet of code added to your site) must be lightweight and not introduce noticeable latency or negatively impact the performance it is meant to monitor.

  
  

  2. Integration and Contextual Data

  End-to-End Tracing: A top-tier RUM tool can link the performance observed in the user’s browser (front end) to the corresponding requests and processing time on your servers (back end). This correlation with APM is essential for quickly determining if an issue is from the client side or server side.

  Business Metric Tagging: The tool should allow you to tag or filter session data using custom properties relevant to your business, such as user ID, conversion step, A/B test group, or customer segment. This allows you to measure performance impact on revenue and critical business outcomes.

  Alerting and Workflow Integration: Look for intelligent, customizable alerting based on performance thresholds or unusual behavior. The tool should offer straightforward APIs or connectors to integrate these alerts into your existing incident management systems (e.g., PagerDuty or Slack).

  Support for Diverse Environments: If your company utilizes mobile apps, single-page applications, or various frameworks, ensure the RUM solution provides suitable software development kits or integration methods for all your platforms.

  
  

  3. Business and Usability Considerations

  Pricing Model: Scrutinize the pricing structure. Is it based on page views, user sessions, recorded events, or data volume? Choose a predictable, scalable model that aligns with your expected growth and budget.

  Usability and Dashboards: The platform must have an intuitive interface and clear, customizable dashboards. The data needs to be accessible and understandable not only by engineers but also by product managers and marketing teams.

  Data Privacy and Security: The RUM vendor must be compliant with major global privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act. Crucially, the tool must offer features for automatically masking or redacting sensitive user information (e.g., credit card numbers or passwords) from session recordings.

  Data Retention Policy: Review the tool’s data retention period for both raw and aggregated data. Longer retention periods are necessary for effective historical trend analysis and seasonal performance comparisons.
• Real User Monitoring Tools

  Real User Monitoring Tools

  RUM tools can monitor and enhance the overall health and performance of your web application with powerful features, such as:

  • Site Performance and User Experience Correlation: RUM tools can correlate website performance and user experience data to help you understand their relationship—for example, RUM can help examine the impact of page load speed on bounce rate; with such accurate data insights, you can optimize site functionality to improve end-user experience
  • Historical Data and Trends Analysis: RUM tools report critical details such as overall page load time, the total number of connection requests, user satisfaction score, and bounce rate while outlining changes from previous time periods
  • Powerful Visualizations: Modern RUM tools can identify performance bottlenecks in a web application and distill them into easily consumable visualizations; these dashboards are often shareable with business partners and customers and help maintain the defined service level agreements
  • API Support: Real user monitoring tools can integrate with your existing performance monitoring and reporting systems or portals via Representational State Transfer APIs, enabling your system developers to create custom scripts, workflows, and applications by leveraging RUM data