RUM stands for real-time user monitoring.

What is real user monitoring (RUM)?

How a consumer interacts with your online services sets the tone for their whole experience with you. Your chances of losing a consumer to a competition grow if your digital experience is poor, inaccessible, or difficult to use. Real-time user monitoring can help you detect these problems before they hurt your business.

Modern digital services are complex, and failure is an unavoidable part of the process. You can avoid having your customers discover your mistakes before you do.

What is real user monitoring?

RUM is a performance monitoring technique that captures extensive information about a user’s engagement with an application. Real-time user monitoring gathers data on a wide range of variables. Data such as navigation start, request start, and speed index metrics are collected on load activities.

A user session often called a click path or a user trip, is a sequence of activities taken by a user while using an application. Even within the same program, user sessions might be very different. For example, one user may fill in many fields, click multiple buttons, and upload a file, yet another may click various buttons and fail to upload the file. You may collect data on each user action throughout a session using RUM, including the time it takes to complete the move, so you can start to spot patterns and discover where you can improve.

A solution should capture all user actions to get a complete view of a user’s experience. Only highly scalable accurate user monitoring solutions, on the other hand, can gather data on all user actions. In contrast, less scalable tools must sample user actions and make assumptions from incomplete data.

How real user monitoring works

Injecting code into an application to record metrics is how accurate user monitoring works. JavaScript code is injected into browser-based apps to detect and track page loads and XHR requests, which update the UI without causing a page load.

Native mobile applications can be monitored by including the monitoring library in the portable app package. Data from the monitoring application is sent to data storage, where it may be queried and viewed. Some existing user monitoring systems have automatic instrumentation, making them quick and simple, while others require a more complicated human setting.

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Real user monitoring vs synthetic monitoring

One of two types of user experience monitoring is accurate user monitoring. Synthetic monitoring is the alternative option. Instead of relying on real users, synthetic monitoring interacts with an application via scripts.

Synthetic monitoring is excellent for proactive simulation and testing of the expected user experience. Synthetic monitoring is ideal for aggressive simulation and testing the desired user experience. In contrast, RUM can catch all the intricacies of your real users, delivering a realistic picture of their knowledge.

Synthetic monitoring’s capacity to collect data regarding a specific metric at regular periods, such as page load time, is beneficial. IT teams can deploy artificial agents in different geographic zones to discover geolocation-based changes in application performance.

Synthetic monitoring is also beneficial for establishing performance baselines. Because the same type of activity is repeated over time, you can gather enough data to estimate the expected level of performance for a given application and setup.

Although synthetic monitoring differs from real-time user monitoring in its applications, both play a significant part in application performance monitoring (APM). RUM and synthetic monitoring fully view the digital experience, mainly when used together.

Examples of real user monitoring

Regular real user monitoring may help almost any application with a user interface. Here are a few examples:

• Keeping an eye on a retailer’s online catalog to see if page load times have increased.
• Using an electronic medical record system to analyze a clinician’s clickstream in order to improve data entry efficiency.
• Detecting performance disparities between different types of mobile devices when using an application
• Following customers through the conversion funnel and attributing income based on that information
• Providing information into service latency to aid developers in identifying code that isn’t working well.

Benefits and limitations of RUM

Real-time user monitoring has a lot of advantages. RUM’s main feature is that it offers information on users’ actual interactions with an application. It can aid in detecting performance issues before they affect many users. Teams can use RUM data to check that service level agreement (SLAs) are being met. UX designers can utilize this information to understand better how users interact with an app and how developers can make it more user-friendly.

Real-time user monitoring has significant drawbacks as well. Because actual user behaviors vary so much, it isn’t easy to use RUM to build performance baselines over time. RUM also creates vast amounts of data. Thus, query and visualization tools that allow RUM users to quickly locate vital information hidden in the data are essential.

It’s also challenging to acquire a clear image of the user’s current situation. A movie-like replay in RUM systems can help users comprehend what’s going on behind the scenes by allowing them to watch exactly what the user does.

Users must actively engage with a service for RUM to work. There is minimal RUM data to work with when usage is low, such as during off-hours. Similarly, if you’re preparing to roll out a new service version, you won’t have RUM data on it until consumers begin using it. It may jeopardize one of the most significant reasons for service monitoring: detecting problems before your customers do. Synthetic monitoring can assist fill in the gaps in this area.

Best practices for RUM

Keep a few best practices in mind if you want to get the most out of accurate user monitoring.

1. Set business goals for how you will use RUM. These should be measurable objectives that you can reach using data. For instance, you might aim to reduce abandoned carts by 10%. Having a defined aim in mind can assist in focusing development efforts and determining which aspects of user behavior to investigate. 
2. Connect RUM’s business and technological aims. Technical objectives should be able to be quantified in terms of business objectives. RUM, for example, is frequently used to assess latency, and the link between more excellent latencies and user disengagement has been well established. Remember how technical performance relates to broader business goals while using RUM to measure technical performance. 
3. RUM is a metric that can be used to evaluate mobile and web-based apps. Make sure to include both mobile and web-based RUM as well. Mobile devices have a wide range of performance characteristics. RUM can assist you in identifying performance issues in mobile apps and devising solutions. 
4. Should use RUM in your test environments. You wouldn’t release software that hasn’t passed basic functional tests, and RUM should be no different. When problems do occur, combining data from additional observability sources, including monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing, can aid in identifying the root cause. 

When user experience meets business impact, you have a winner.
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See if applications are working as customers expect, obtain AI-powered solutions to address issues before affecting end-users proactively, and improve business outcomes.

What to look for in RUM solution

When looking for an accurate user monitoring solution, seek one that combines excellent RUM capabilities with an all-in-one observability platform to get the most bang for your buck. Observability gives you a complete picture of what your users are going through and why it’s happening.

The best RUM solution combines AI-powered distributed tracing with complicated, distributed cloud-native applications to allow observability. Integrating backend data from monitoring and logging services will enable you to track out the source of user experience issues caused by infrastructure or application issues. This end-to-end visibility allows you to move swiftly and provide superior digital experiences.

Additionally, search for solutions that capture a complete picture of a user’s session. Tools that simply sample data can leave your users’ experiences with blind spots. Without enough coverage, sampling may overlook instances of poor performance, causing a delay in detecting a severe problem. Furthermore, the ability to supplement RUM data with business contexts such as revenue and voice-of-customer data allows you to understand better the business effect of application performance and user experience, allowing you to improve business results.

You can grasp the whole context of a user’s actions with a solution that incorporates session replay capabilities. Session Replay creates video-like playbacks of a recorded user session, providing visibility into user sessions that isn’t attainable when viewing metrics out of context. Session Replay should support fast deployment life cycles and protected resources. The replay can help you better grasp the context of a user’s experience, which can help you develop new features or enhance performance.

Enteros

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.