Real-User Monitoring vs. Synthetic Monitoring

Synthetic Monitoring vs. Real-User Monitoring: How to Improve Your Customer Experience

Companies are more focused on their digital experience than ever, as COVID-19 has hastened the world’s move online. Keeping customers pleased by improving website speed, availability, and performance is critical. And outages are costly. In 2014, Gartner estimated that when a company’s website goes down, it loses an average of $5,600.00 every minute, or over $300,000.00 per hour. ​

According to the BBC, every second that a page takes longer to load causes 10% of users to leave. The key to creating excellent digital client experiences is to monitor, measure, and improve your digital properties. A skill has a direct bearing on your company’s success.

Many site owners utilize Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring to measure uptime and performance, two essential Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) components.

Developers and IT operations teams utilize RUM and synthetics to ensure that virtual endpoints are online and that clients have a great experience.

RUM and synthetics aid teams on a deeper level:

• Improve uptime for essential services, APIs, and third-party dependencies proactively. 
• Before pushing to production, detect and eliminate issues, slowness, and poor functionality to ensure a successful deployment. 
• Improve the consumer experience by providing material more quickly, increasing page interaction, and maintaining visual consistency. 

RUM and synthetic monitoring promise that they will enable teams to proactively ensure a positive customer experience while also making educated decisions that will boost digital business performance.

We’ll go through three major themes for your client experience in this post:

1. Monitoring the front end (or end-user) is an integral part of your digital marketing approach. It’s also critical to comprehend your end-user experience and the link between website performance, customer experience, and commercial outcomes. 
2. Synthetic and real-user monitoring (RUM) combine to give you a complete picture of your end-user experience. The two are entirely complementary, and some teams feel it beneficial, if not critical, to use them together. 
3. The best monitoring strategies provide end-to-end observability. Developers may use this method to create a single, holistic framework for improving the digital consumer experience at all layers of the stack. 

Why is frontend monitoring different—and why is it necessary?

Frontend monitoring, often known as “client-side monitoring,” is concerned with what happens after the server sends data to the web browser and your end-users. As a result, there’s evidence that adopting a frontend monitoring solution adds value:

• Understanding customer experience: A digital business must be able to answer fundamental questions about customer experience, such as: Is it possible for users to access our website? Is our website loading quickly enough? Do all of our site’s features and components function properly? After assuring essential availability, site owners should focus on performance and functionality. Customers will eventually notice flaws. On the other hand, it can assist teams in measuring performance in a staging environment before seeing real user experience from the diverse set of clients, device types, networks, and browser types found in production environments. 
• Endpoints, APIs, and third-party health monitoring: To transmit information to web browsers and end-users, modern websites rely primarily on microservices, APIs, and third parties. Synthetics tests and monitors should ideally alert site operators if service endpoints, APIs, and third-party components are up, running and giving accurate results and information that support a satisfactory end-user experience. 
• Managing interdependent technologies and distributed systems: A modern website is complicated, with a dynamic mix of frameworks, APIs, images, third-party services, plugins, content platforms, and more delivering experiences. Building a site that satisfies consumers regardless of location, network, or device is part of a company’s “job one.” Hundreds of resources, API calls, application transactions, and services are sent from the server to the browser, and frontend monitoring can answer performance problems. 
• Monitoring end-user experience may assist inform crucial technological and business decisions, which can help empower digital companies. Teams use end-user data to address questions about how fast they need to be to increase essential metrics like the number of checkouts or ad clicks and actual availability. Slow websites have a business impact that may be quantified by digital enterprises that successfully measure end-user data. 

To visualize any digital business consequence, RUM and synthetic data are required.

Synthetic monitoring vs. RUM
​
Can do monitoring crucial endpoints and the end-user experience in two ways. The first, known as real-user monitoring (RUM), collects timing and performance data from users who visit websites and apps. RUM is known as “field data” because it reflects a diverse, sometimes befuddling, mix of real users accessing your site over various networks, web browsers, regions, and device types, each with its version.

On the other hand, synthetic monitoring informs uptime, functionality, and performance by simulating user transactions on a website in advance. Synthetic tests or monitors often use rapid network connections with specified circumstances (chosen web browsers, regions, and URLs) to tell IT operators about the health of crucial endpoints or user flows, resulting in the name “lab data.” When used together, RUM and synthetics are typically referred to as lab data and field data.

RUM (real-user monitoring): what end-users see and hear
​
As the name implies, real-user monitoring tracks actual user interactions with a website or web application. It is known as passive frontend monitoring: The solution relies on real user traffic to collect metrics.

A RUM solution is often implemented by adding a JavaScript code snippet to a site’s page headers. This script takes basic information about the user and their experience when they visit the page:

• Measurement of performance or timeliness (commonly captured by the navigation timing API) 
• End-user dimensional information, such as web browser kind and version, operating system, device type, and geographic location (based on their IP address) 
• Errors information (such as JavaScript errors) 

Site owners can employ real-time user monitoring to address immediate issues and improve the client experience.

Considerations for short-term troubleshooting:

• Is it true that our most recent deployment improved page speed and performance? 
• Which JS errors have the most impact on customers? 
• Is our website’s experience consistent across different web browsers, devices, and locations? 

Considerations for long-term optimization:

• How quickly does our page need to load to boost order value? 
• How should our pages be designed to reduce abandonment? 
• To improve our end-user experience, should we create a “center of excellence,” “speed team,” or performance budgets? 

Data from Real User Monitoring, including page group traffic, page load metrics, and user volume over time.

Synthetic monitoring: assuring uptime, functionality, and performance proactively.

By contrast, “active monitoring” refers to synthetic monitoring. Synthetic monitoring, in theory, should detect and help repair site issues before clients notice them. It assesses frontend performance by simulating user activities and tracking and evaluating the outcomes of such simulations.

Synthetic monitoring solutions provide dependable, consistent, and repeatable tools for monitoring your virtual endpoints’ availability, functionality, performance, user paths, and APIs.

• Critical endpoints and APIs are available at all times. Synthetic monitoring answers the uptime problem for critical services and API endpoints. Because synthetic tests provide ongoing feedback, synthetic monitoring solutions will frequently be the first place teams look to troubleshoot issues. Synthetic monitors let groups articulate the severity of a problem and prepare a response by addressing the impact and extent of what effect when a website goes down.
• Components of the page’s functionality. Synthetic monitoring addresses the question, “Does my site perform as intended?” for every button, link, and interaction feature on a site. Synthetic workflows go over key user routes, clicks, and interactions regularly to ensure users don’t run into any broken, missing, or mislabeled features. 
• The speed of the page. “How quick are we?” is answered through synthetic monitoring. Modern synthetic monitoring solutions across popular user pathways return comprehensive page timing information, including full-page load time and performance of all page components and third parties. 
• You are benchmarking against competitors. “How fast is our competition?” can likewise be answered with synthetic monitoring. Businesses frequently aim to improve site speed and performance; however, because there is no way to lower page speed to 0 seconds at this time, an excellent way to set performance goals is to compare your site speed to that of your competitors. 

Synthetic monitoring is commonly employed as the first line of defense for debugging errors and outages but can also use to guide longer-term optimization decisions:

Considerations for short-term troubleshooting:

• What is the scope and severity of a power outage? 
• Is there a problem with our services, or is it a problem with an API, a third party, or an internet service provider? 
• Where can we fine-tune performance before deploying to production while remaining in staging? 

Considerations for long-term optimization:

• How quickly do we move in comparison to our competitors and industry? 
• How can we optimize our CI/CD pipeline’s deployments over time? 
• What effect do page weight and total resources (both first and third party) have on page speed and performance? 

Recognize how page resources, APIs, and third parties affect customers.

Observability necessitates a holistic picture of system health.
​
By enhancing uptime and performance for both their frontend and backend, successful digital organizations give value (higher uptime, increased customer happiness, and increased income). Because your end-user experience is made up of infrastructure, databases, services, and APIs that are all updated or reconfigured regularly, there are a few things you can do to reduce the impact of change on your customers:

• Troubleshoot the entire stack in less time. Within the Synthetics results page, compare endpoint availability to the health of its underlying services. Use to visualize the health of a collection of interconnected components (also known as entities) that make up a service. MELT (metrics, events, logs, traces) places your system components in context and surfaces faults and signals that might otherwise go undiscovered. As you rapidly scale environments, our Kubernetes cluster explorer can show you the health of your endpoints. 
• With confidence, embrace cloud migration and its technology. Use service maps to see how microservice architectures perform in real-time (transaction time, response time). As you adopt new cloud services, keep an eye on performance and set up bespoke alarms. To fine-tune workflows, consider using serverless functions or cloud databases.
  
• Debug with end-user context and code-level visibility. Code-level visibility to stack traces and error details—down to the log level—is provided to comprehend the issue immediately, track its impact throughout the stack, recreate it locally, and remedy it. We’ve got you covered, whether it’s JS issues in the web browser, native mobile app bugs, unhandled errors, or any other system anomaly affecting your end-users.
• Examine the performance of third-party applications. Data, email, messaging, content, and other functionalities provided by third-party services are beneficial. They can, however, establish backend dependencies that put the system at risk of degradation or crash. 

Workloads give you a complete picture of a service’s health and dependencies.

Provide excellent digital customer service.
​
If you only remember one item from this comment, make it this: one of your most essential tools for providing excellent digital client experiences is comprehensive, fully integrated monitoring capabilities.

It’s not a matter of deciding between synthetic and real-user frontend monitoring or between frontend and backend monitoring. You’ll have more success creating a genuinely exceptional digital client experience if all of these monitoring capabilities are operating for your team—and the closer they work together, the better.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.