Real User Monitoring(RUM)

You and your team invest a great deal of time, passion, and energy in creating solutions that improve people’s lives. But no matter how carefully you code, real-life users and device environments are highly complex and unpredictable. It’s hard to be sure your work will always deliver the intended experience once you release it into the wild.

Real user monitoring (RUM) provides direct visibility into your user experience, allowing you to identify errors and improve user pain points.

What Is the Real User Monitoring (RUM)?

Real user monitoring, also known as RUM or end-user monitoring, is a form of passive application performance monitoring (APM). Not to be confused with mobile real user experience monitoring (MRUM), RUM enables you to collect and analyze data about every user interaction within your service or software.

Unlike traditional APM tools that focus on system-level metrics and logs, RUM monitors the entirety of how real users actually engage with your platform.

Why we need Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Understanding how users behave when using your app or website in the real world lets you actively improve your user experience before the issues impact your business.

It provides visibility into how users interact with your product and how effectively the software responds to each user action and network request.

Such detailed user-centric insights allow your team to measure performance, optimize user journeys, and ultimately create a more dynamic, reliable, and responsive experience.

RUM is versatile and can be used on various platforms and apps. Although for phones and tablets, Mobile RUM can provide more in-depth analyses specifically tailored to those devices.

How does real user monitoring work?

Since RUM is most commonly associated web monitoring, let’s cover that use case. Getting visibility involves injecting some JavaScript code to enable passive tracking whenever a user visits the website or web app.

It provides visibility into how users interact with your product and how effectively the software responds to each user action and network request.

The code can measure everything from page load times to DNS delays and send the data back to a server for analysis. You can use it to examine how your website or app behaves inside the browser and identify database or server errors.

An optimal RUM solution should be fine-grained enough to let you spot exactly where your users might be experiencing friction. It should let you observe every step of a user’s journey from first touch to payment or show you what happened before they decided to quit a session.

The solution should also be able to highlight differences in user experiences according to different user conditions, like geographic location, device type, or network conditions. For example, you might discover that many users in Germany are experiencing unexpected time-outs when trying to connect to your servers. RUM data is valuable in helping you optimize your UX and ensure that applications meet the expectations of real-world customers, no matter where they are.

Real user monitoring examples

Many companies leverage the benefits of RUM to improve their online performance across platforms. Three commonly used RUM tools are:

Datadog — Datadog’s RUM solution provides real-time monitoring of the activity and experience of web and mobile app users. Among other things, it allows you to track frontend performance, network requests, and user journeys, monitor and track bugs and errors, and access all user session information.

Dynatrace — This cloud-based RUM platform covers various aspects of application performance. Dynatrace offers full-stack monitoring, including frontend, backend, and infrastructure monitoring.

New Relic — New Relic includes tools to compare your web metrics to industry standards, monitor global performance, track error rates, and identify adverse user interactions.

Benefit of Real User Monitoring (RUM)?

Let’s take a closer look at how RUM improves the user experience:

Performance optimization — With data on user interactions, you can spot bottlenecks and rectify issues such as poor load times or platform sluggishness before they affect more users.

User-centric insights — Capturing data on behaviors and preferences allows you to better tailor your digital offerings to meet user expectations.

Error detection and reporting — RUM can swiftly identify and report errors like memory leaks, resource exhaustion, and ANRs (Application Not Responding), enabling prompt resolution for a smoother online experience.

Conversion rate improvement — By analyzing user interactions, RUM helps engineers eliminate friction points and enhance the effectiveness of digital strategies to increase conversion rates and reduce churn.

Summary and Conclusions

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is very potent weapon to analyse User's experience, interest area's and key blockers in fast service usage for Web and Mobile platforms. This holds futuristic monitoring approach with better customer centric outcomes.

Author

Sagar Mehta is Atgen Software Solutions Founder and a recognised expert in the field of Intelligent Automation, including Robotic Process Automation, Workload Automation, DevOps, SRE and Advanced Analytics. Sagar advocates a pragmatic approach to Automation, encouraging a policy of using ‘the best tool for the job’.

Prior to co-founding Atgen Software Solutions, Sagar worked in Senior Automation roles, architecting and delivering robust, scalable solutions for many of the world’s biggest banks and working with leading Automation vendors. He developed his first automated solution in 2006 and has continued to deliver robust, scalable and sophisticated Automation ever since.

Sagar is a regular guest speaker and panellist at Automation seminars, conferences and user group events.