Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Real user monitoring helps you monitor visitors’ every move, revealing critical insights into the user experience, such as:

• Are pages loading too slowly?
• Is the checkout process too complicated?
• Are customers struggling to find what they’re looking for?

Defining real user monitoring

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a crucial aspect of application performance monitoring (APM), encompassing various technologies and tools. RUM, a component of the comprehensive APM technology, is dedicated to enhancing your customer’s experience. It continuously tracks and analyzes user interactions with your website to provide valuable insights.

In essence, RUM gathers data from real user activities, allowing you to understand user perceptions of your service and make necessary improvements with the help of a Splunk License.

For instance, if you operate an e-commerce platform like eBay or Amazon, RUM will monitor key user interactions such as:

• Page load times
• Checkout processes
• Search functionality

By tracking these elements, RUM helps identify bottlenecks in the user journey, enabling you to optimize your application’s performance effectively.

Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring

Real User Monitoring (RUM) takes a practical approach by tracking actual user interactions to provide insights into how a site or service functions. This tracking helps paint a clear picture of long-term trends in user experience.

In contrast, synthetic monitoring uses simulated data to evaluate how a site should perform in real-world scenarios. This method allows you to identify and fix short-term issues without relying on live traffic.

The real power, however, lies in combining these two approaches. By integrating RUM and synthetic monitoring, you get a comprehensive view of the user experience, enabling you to analyze both long-term trends and immediate performance issues.

RUM metrics

RUM metrics are categorized based on the platform: browsers, Android, and iOS. Here are some common real-user monitoring metrics:

Custom event count: Tracks the total number of spans with the selected custom event within a specified time range.

Page views and route changes: Measures the total number of page views and route changes, organized by individual pages within the chosen time frame.

JavaScript errors: Counts the total number of spans containing JavaScript errors during the specified time range.

Long task count: Represents the total number of long tasks occurring within the defined time frame, which impact user experience by causing delays in page rendering.

Network requests: Counts the total number of network requests, including HTTPS, XHR, and AJAX, within a specific time range.

By tracking these browser-specific RUM metrics, you can gain valuable insights into the user experience of web applications.

How real user monitoring works

With the right tool, real user monitoring (RUM) becomes seamless and efficient. Here’s how an effective RUM solution should function:

Capturing Data: RUM begins by collecting data from your website. This is done by embedding a JavaScript tag directly onto the webpage or through a secure API. This tag tracks user interactions, creating a continuous data stream.

Assembling Data into User Activity: The collected data is processed by the RUM tool, transforming it into real-time insights. These insights reveal which users are accessing specific web pages and highlight any ongoing transactional or geographic issues.

Visualizing Real User Activity: To make the data more comprehensible, the processed user interactions are displayed as reports or dashboards. These visual representations help you understand how users are engaging with your services.

Through this structured process, RUM provides actionable insights, allowing you to improve the customer experience effectively.

Reasons to monitor real user metrics

Real user monitoring impacts your website performance positively by helping you discover and solve critical issues. Here are some core benefits of monitoring your visitor’s activity:

Track where errors occur

With Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can measure each component of a web application, ensuring no errors go undetected. This allows for detailed performance scrutiny of individual elements. Here’s how it works:

Full User Session Analysis: RUM uses streaming analytics to capture and analyze entire user sessions, from the moment users start using the service until they leave. For mobile apps, RUM provides detailed insights into client-related attributes and events, including:

• Device Type: Identifies the type of device being used.
• Operating System: Tracks whether the OS is iOS or Android.
• Network Requests: Monitors network requests made by the app.
• Errors or Crashes: Detects any errors or crashes that occur.

RUM also allows you to analyze the numerous variables that contribute to a single issue within a complex distributed system. This comprehensive approach ensures you can identify and address problems effectively, improving overall performance and user experience.

Measure every user component

RUM is technology-agnostic, measuring every aspect of user interactions. It tracks each user session, recording the resources (such as images and routes) that users access and how these affect their experience. This comprehensive tracking allows you to analyze page performance and address any issues. When

something goes wrong, RUM helps you determine the cause, whether it’s a code change or an update that introduced the problem. By capturing this detailed data, RUM ensures you can effectively troubleshoot and optimize your web applications, leading to a better user experience.

Assess the health of your user experience

With Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can evaluate the overall performance and health of your user experience using the following metrics:

Page Load Times: Measure how quickly your web pages load for users.

User Experiences on Various Devices: Assess how your application performs across different devices, such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Geographical Disparities in Performance: Identify performance differences based on the geographical location of your users.

In essence, real user monitoring enhances the user experience and improves the overall performance of your web or app.

Challenges associated with real user monitoring

While RUM offers valuable insights, it has certain challenges and limitations, especially for big tech and government organizations:

Data Volume Dependency

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is most effective when dealing with large volumes of data. If your website has limited traffic or few daily users, RUM won’t provide accurate results. Therefore, it is advisable to wait until your audience grows to maximize the capabilities of RUM.

Expensive Tools

Implementing and maintaining RUM tools can be costly, especially for large organizations with extensive customer bases. It’s crucial to weigh your budget constraints against the potential benefits of monitoring. Before you begin, assess your financial capacity to ensure your organization can support RUM effectively.

In summary, RUM is less effective for websites with limited traffic and can be financially challenging for large organizations.

Leverage real user monitoring to optimize service performance

By leveraging Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can enhance your application’s performance across web browsers, Android, and iOS platforms. This not only satisfies users but also leads to higher sales and happier customers.

In a digital landscape where every click, page load, and interaction matters, RUM helps organizations understand, adapt, and thrive. By using RUM strategically, you can transform visitor interactions into successful conversions.

Purchase Splunk Real User Monitoring License

Customers can order various Splunk software and licenses by contacting our sales specialists at Golicense.