Do You Know What is Real User Monitoring? How Real User Monitoring Works?

Real User Monitoring:

Real User Monitoring, or RUM, is a type of monitoring technology for digital businesses that analyzes customers’ digital experiences by looking at exactly how online visitors are interacting with a website or application. Real User Monitoring analyzes everything from page load events to HTTP requests to frontend application crashes. It’s also known as digital experience monitoring, real user measurement, user monitoring, end-user experience monitoring or RUM.

The most well-known example of website traffic analytics is Google Analytics, or GA, which tracks certain types of interaction between your users and your website or webapp. GA can track page views, click paths, browser types, and traffic sources but is it really telling you how satisfied your users are?

GA does a good job of giving you high-level data about your end users’ digital journey, where they come from, what pages they access, and so on. However, it doesn’t collect the data you need to easily assess their overall level of satisfaction. GA was not built for that. That is where RUM comes in.

This monitoring software is part of APM (Application Performance Monitoring) and it allows you to stay in control of your users’ digital experience, and in turn, their level of satisfaction. Basically, RUM allows you to dive into performance metrics based on a single user’s or users’ business journey, mapping out anomalies throughout their experience. These performance and user experience metrics give you the opportunity to understand what went wrong, where and in turn, fix it so that it doesn’t impact a large number of users.

How Real User Monitoring Works?

RUM technology collects a website or app’s performance measures straight from the browser of the end user. A small amount of JavaScript is embedded in each page. This script then collects data from each user as he or she explores the page, and transfers that data back for analysis.


Data visualizations are particularly useful. Because RUM collects data points from such a high volume of users over a wide array of metrics, visualizations such as bar, chart, and area graphs make these large volumes of data more easily digestible – meaning it’s easier to glean actionable insights from your data.

Examples of RUM

In the real world, it’s used to monitor applications and websites in order to surface problems other testing methods can’t unveil. Some examples include:

• Constant monitoring of a blog in the background to see when and where page load times increase. A developer might notice that during prime time, traffic spikes cause an increase in timeouts, resulting in frustrated customers and lower Google rankings.
  
  

• An end-user portal like a bank software system may use it to spot intermittent issues, like login failures that only occur under specific, rare conditions.
  
  

• A Tech Lead can use Real-User Monitoring to quickly assess the health of their application.

• An app developer may use it to highlight failures in different platforms that don’t show up during pre-deployment testing.

• A development team can use RUM to troubleshoot problems caused by a deployment, narrowing down the surface search are by employing filters.

• Product managers without too much coding expertise can use dashboards provided by RUM tools in order to detect when high-priority pages are performing poorly, and then allocates resources in an efficient way to solve the problem.
  
  

Best Practices for RUM

There are several best practices that can help you get the most out of RUM including:

• Assess the Current Speed of the Website. Faster websites lead to higher customer engagement, so paying attention to load time data is key.
  
  

• Identify and Track Specific Objectives: Doing so enables you to align those objectives with business goals. For example, we can set and track performance to a target like “increase conversion rate from 10% to 15%.”
  
  

• Improve Mobile Testing Strategy: Development and testing challenges continue to arise as native mobile app use spreads. Use RUM to gain new visibility into native mobile apps.
  
  

• Relate Performance to the Business: Not a disembodied tool, real user monitoring should start with business goals, then flow down to how well our current systems meet those targets. It is first and foremost a dashboard to gauge our progress.