What is Real User Monitoring (RUM)?

• Real User Monitoring (RUM) Definition

  Real User Monitoring (RUM) 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 to report back on the page load data and other performance metrics. This data is based on actual user interactions, allowing you to quickly identify and optimize the website areas requiring immediate attention for improving 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 actual 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, browser types, and more. Having such granular visibility into app performance can help eradicate hard-to-detect problems quickly before they reach end users and, as a result, brings 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.
• RUM metrics

  RUM metrics

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

  User satisfaction score or Apdex is a numerical indicator that determines 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 browser. RUM tools can display the actual load times with various filters, such as user location, browser, and device type.

  Active users show 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 denotes the total number of HTTP requests directed towards a particular web server for accessing site content.

  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 the frequently visited pages on a website. These pages often bring high-value conversions and must be optimized accordingly.

  Top platforms enables you to monitor and improve your website performance across desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. 
• RUM vs. synthetic monitoring

  RUM vs. 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 spot the differences when it comes to synthetic monitoring vs 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 the website or application performance in the background, including the availability, usability, and responsiveness. This approach also requires a decent amount of traffic or 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 the long-term performance trends is more straightforward with RUM by analyzing the 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 the short-term performance issues during application development. Additionally, synthetic monitoring enables QA 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.
• 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:

  Correlate site performance with user experience: RUM tools can correlate the 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 for improving the 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 the change 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 SLAs.

  API support: Real user monitoring tools can integrate with your existing performance monitoring and reporting systems or portals via RESTful APIs. This enables your system developers to create custom scripts, workflows, and applications by leveraging the RUM data.