In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, understanding user behavior in real-time is crucial for delivering optimal online experiences. Real-Time User Monitoring (RUM) is a powerful tool that allows businesses to track and analyze how visitors interact with their websites or applications as it happens. This insight provides valuable data to improve performance, enhance user experience, and resolve issues proactively. In this blog, we’ll explore the fundamentals of RUM, how it works, and why it’s essential for modern businesses looking to stay competitive in an increasingly user-centric world.
What is Real User Monitoring?
Real user monitoring (RUM) is critical for tracking and measuring the end-user experience. Real user monitoring (RUM) helps you understand what your users think of your web properties, giving you valuable insights on how to improve your sites and deliver value to your customers. You’re probably already using tools that track and measure server-side activities, but RUM is different. RUM sees the users’ experiences from their point of view- the client perspective.
RUM is sometimes known as browser monitoring because the end-user experience happens in their browser; however, RUM also extends to experiences on mobile devices and hybrid frameworks. RUM tracks and measures the activities that impact your users’ experiences, such as how long they have to wait for a page or element to load, whether the page has errors, how long AJAX and HTTP requests take to respond, or how long they engage with your site. This data gives you greater knowledge from the perspective of your customers and not just the technology delivering your services.
RUM is a core feature of digital experience monitoring (DEM). While other aspects of application performance monitoring (APM) involve measuring server-side performance (the backend), real end user experience monitoring measures client-side performance-the browser where users interact with your application.
Understanding How Real User Monitoring Works
RUM platforms use real-time data captured as users engage with your web pages. The platform then analyzes the data and presents information in a meaningful visualization to give you insights about your visitors. RUM includes the following three steps:
1. Data capture: User experiences come from real user activities on your pages. To collect this data, either a secure API is used, or a JavaScript tag is directly embedded into the page, creating a data stream from the user’s browser to the New Relic RUM platform. This data can include page and element load times, errors, AJAX and HTTP request response times, and more. The more data that’s gathered, the more insight RUM can provide.
2. Data processing: The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform sorts and analyzes the data into actionable information that provides real-time insights. Understanding who’s accessing your pages, their location, and their engagement metrics provides valuable insights into user behavior. By identifying friction points and potential issues, you can proactively address disruptions, ensuring seamless and high-quality digital experiences for every user.
3. Data visualization: Graphs, charts, and other visuals allow you to more quickly ingest RUM’s findings faster than reports. New Relic’s RUM dashboards are organized to allow you to quickly understand your users’ experiences and issues that need to be addressed. Faster, easier-to-interpret charts can help you quickly solve problems to deliver superior user experiences and better business outcomes.
How Real-Time User Monitoring Solutions Work
Real-time user monitoring solutions track user actions with websites and applications by embedding a small snippet of JavaScript code on a website or integrating a user monitoring software development kit (SDK) into an application. The code runs in the background during user sessions to collect data on interactions and performance metrics.
The data gleaned from real-time user monitoring is streamed back to administrators, then processed and analyzed to deliver actionable insights into the user experience. Data may be presented through dashboards and reports showing key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as trends over time. Real-time user monitoring tools can also provide real-time alerting when significant issues arise, letting IT teams pinpoint and remediate them before they impact users.
Providers of RUM solutions offer a variety of features, including alerting systems to detect problems in real time and log management for deeper analysis. RUM tools integrate seamlessly with existing workflows as well as APM services and observability platforms to provide comprehensive insights into the performance of web applications and end-user experiences.
Real User Monitoring vs. Synthetic Monitoring
Real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring are two key types of performance monitoring, each with its strengths and weaknesses. While RUM provides data from actual users in real-time, synthetic monitoring uses automated scripts to simulate user interactions and predict potential issues.
Synthetic monitoring can be useful in early-stage testing and monitoring when real user data is not yet available. It can simulate various scenarios and conditions, such as high load or network latency, and predict how the website or application would perform under those conditions. However, it cannot fully replicate the complexity and unpredictability of real user behavior.
Real user monitoring captures the full breadth and depth of user experiences. It provides a more accurate and comprehensive view of how users interact with the website or application, and the issues they encounter. However, it is reactive rather than proactive, meaning it identifies issues after they have occurred.
Benefits of Real User Monitoring
1. Availability
RUM provides real-time data about the availability of your website or application from the perspective of the user. It monitors the performance of your website or application, allowing you to identify and address issues before they impact the user’s experience. This proactive approach can have a significant impact on your business, reducing downtime and maintaining user satisfaction.
2. Session Tracking
RUM provides an in-depth analysis of each user session, giving you a clearer understanding of your user’s journey. This feature allows you to see how users interact with your website or application, from the moment they land on your website to the moment they leave. It helps you identify bottlenecks in the user’s journey and adjust accordingly. By improving the user journey, you will likely see increased user engagement and, consequently, higher conversion rates.
3. Anomaly and Error Detection
Anomalies and errors can drastically affect the user experience. With RUM, you can detect these issues in real-time. It monitors page load times, user behavior, and other key performance indicators to identify anomalies and errors. Once detected, you can immediately rectify these issues, minimizing their impact on the user. This proactive approach can significantly improve the overall user experience.
Best practices for RUM
To leverage the greatest benefits of real user monitoring, keep in mind several best practices.
1. Establish business objectives for how you use RUM:
These should be quantifiable goals that you can use data to help you achieve. For example, you may want to decrease abandoned carts by 10%. Having a specific goal like this in mind can help to focus development efforts and help to determine what aspects of user behavior to look at.
2. Link RUM business objectives to technical goals:
Technical goals should be able to quantify business goals. For example, RUM is often used to measure latency, and the relationship between longer latencies and user disengagement is well documented. When using RUM to measure technical performance, keep in mind how that ties back to overall business goals.
3. Measure RUM for mobile and web-based apps:
In addition, be sure to include mobile RUM as well as web-based RUM. The performance characteristics of mobile devices can vary widely. RUM can help you identify performance problems in mobile apps and devise ways to mitigate those issues.
4. Include RUM in your test environments:
You wouldn’t deploy code that hasn’t passed basic functional tests, and you should have similar tests for RUM. Also, integrating data from other observability data, such as monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing, can help to identify the root cause when problems do occur.
Datadog vs Dynatrace Real User Monitoring
Here’s a comparison of Datadog real user monitoring and Dynatrace real user monitoring in terms of Real User Monitoring (RUM):
User Interface and Experience:
- Datadog: Offers a clean and customizable dashboard that integrates RUM seamlessly with other observability data, such as logs and metrics. It’s intuitive but can require some setup.
- Dynatrace: Known for its easy-to-navigate interface with automated problem detection. RUM is highly integrated into the platform, making it user-friendly with minimal configuration required.
End-User Performance Insights:
- Datadog: Provides detailed performance monitoring with user session replay, page load times, and geographic data, but it might require additional custom configuration for deeper insights.
- Dynatrace: Offers comprehensive, AI-driven insights into user behavior and performance with automatic root cause analysis, session replay, and visibility into mobile and web apps out-of-the-box.
AI and Automation:
- Datadog: Has basic AI capabilities in anomaly detection but lacks the deep automation found in Dynatrace’s AI-driven insights for RUM data.
- Dynatrace: Uses artificial intelligence (Davis AI) to automatically detect performance issues and anomalies in user experience without requiring manual configuration, enhancing proactive monitoring.
Integration with Other Monitoring Tools:
- Datadog: Strong integration with other monitoring tools like APM, logs, and infrastructure metrics, creating a unified observability platform, but setup can be complex.
- Dynatrace: Fully integrated out-of-the-box with its cloud-native APM, infrastructure, and network security monitoring tools, providing a more seamless experience in managing real user data.
Customization and Reporting:
- Datadog: Provides extensive custom dashboards, filters, and reporting options for RUM data. Users can tailor the reporting to suit specific needs but may require more effort.
- Dynatrace: Offers pre-built, AI-driven reports and custom dashboards. Its automated analysis and reporting tools simplify the process, making it easier to get meaningful insights without additional configuration.
Frequently Asked Questions:-
1. What does it mean to monitor a user simultaneously?
Real time user monitoring involves the observation of how users are engaging with a website or application as they engage with it.
2. What are the reasons for performing real-time user monitoring?
It is used to detect problems, enhance users satisfaction, and guarantee that the website or the application runs effectively.
3. What does real-time user monitoring measure?
It measures and analyzes page request rates, time and frequency of user sessions, usage frequencies, errors, and the systems’ performance.
4. What does it mean to monitor real users?
It employs tracking scripts or agents in a way that captures data resulting from users’ interactions, and this is unloaded in real time to enable performance and usability assessment.
5. To whom is the monitoring of user activity in real time advantageous?
It is used by many businessmen, independent developers and IT departments to optimize performance, to debug and to increase end user’s satisfaction.
6. Is real-time user monitoring safe?
Yes, when done right it anonymizes sensitive data and it is in conformity with data privacy laws.
7. Can the level of real-time monitoring significantly affect the conversion rate?
Yes, slow performance is one of the main drivers behind poor conversion rates, real-time monitoring allows you to pinpoint and rectify areas of slow performance, improved experience thus resulting in better conversion rates.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Real-Time User Monitoring is an indispensable asset for businesses aiming to optimize their digital presence. By tracking user behavior in real time, RUM helps identify performance bottlenecks, monitor system health, and enhance overall user satisfaction. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, incorporating RUM into your strategy ensures that you stay ahead of the curve, adapting quickly to user needs and improving overall site functionality. With the insights it provides, RUM empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions that drive growth, customer loyalty, and success in a competitive online environment.