What is real user monitoring?

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—at the client side. 

RUM is sometimes known as browser monitoring because the end-user experience happens in their browser; however, RUM also extends to manage 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), RUM measures client-side performance—the browser where users interact with your application.

New Relic’s RUM software solution gives you insight into these types of data, plus much more information to help you better understand your users.

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.

Examples of real user monitoring

RUM tools are essential for gaining a clear understanding of user experiences, regardless of the industry. Here are some ways different industries use RUM:

• Ecommerce: Monitoring page load times in a web store can help retailers optimize user experiences by detecting and solving page slow down problems.
• SaaS platforms: Understanding a user’s journey within a SaaS platform can help streamline and refine process efficiencies, enhancing experience overall.
• Mobile apps: Surfacing insights on how performance differs across various mobile devices can help deliver a consistent experience for users across all devices when accessing the same service.
• Banking and sales: RUM can help financial institutions and retailers understand how users interact with their website, how long it takes to access pages or elements essential to transactions, and quickly pinpoint and resolve issues that could compromise user experience.
• DevOps: Measuring latencies and other performance factors can help developers optimize code and user experiences.

Why is real user monitoring important?

Everything in an application—from infrastructure to microservices to browser and mobile experiences—is ultimately designed and built around creating a good experience for your end users. Traditional tools like focus groups, surveys, and A/B testing can provide foundational pieces of the puzzle. RUM, on the other hand, provides comprehensive, real-time, and continuous insights that allow you to respond quickly to issues and optimize the user experience.

For example, ecommerce users will abandon a website within seconds if there are slow page loads or other errors. If users have a particularly bad experience with an application, there are further ripple effects. According to one study by Forbes, 40% of users will leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load, while 88% will not revisit a website that delivers a poor experience. Here’s the bottom line: poor user experience negatively impacts not just customer satisfaction but also your brand’s reputation and success.

Waiting until the users start complaining—or worse, quitting your application altogether—might be already too late. Real-time RUM data offers the insight needed to proactively maintain—and create —positive user experiences.

In addition to avoiding site performance issues, RUM helps you optimize your websites. Improvements in website speed have a strong positive impact on end-user behavior, which significantly benefits the bottom line. For instance, RUM can help you understand which parts of your site or a specific page users interact with most—or least, such as scroll depth, clicking on specific elements, or how long it takes a user to complete an action, like filling out a form. RUM can also help you quickly see spikes in activity or other anomalies that may trigger a speedy response from your team. Real-time insights can help you resolve issues faster and allow users to easily complete transactions without facing hurdles like slow load times or unresponsive page elements. 

According to a study conducted by Deloitte, a 0.1 second improvement in a site’s speed led to an 8.4% increase in conversions with retail consumers. In addition, customer orders increased by 9.2% on average. So even if your site seems to be performing without obvious issues, RUM can still help you improve the user experience by helping you locate and optimize pages that aren’t performing as well as they could. Beyond helping you optimize your existing web properties, RUM informs your DevOps team about past system issues and successes as they build new services and sites.

When end users do have problems, you also need to pinpoint the source of the issue. In order to have full observability into your application, you need to monitor all parts of the stack from the server to the browser.

How does real user monitoring differ from traditional performance monitoring?

Traditional performance monitoring focuses on server-side metrics, infrastructure performance, and system transactions, while RUM concentrates on the end-user experience. RUM provides insights into load times, page rendering, and user interactions, offering a user-centric perspective that goes beyond just server-centric metrics.

Modern client-side applications have also become increasingly complex, often combining single-page applications (SPAs) with highly dynamic elements and increased interactivity for end users. In order to increase client-side performance, developers often bundle code that runs in the end user’s browser client and minimizes interaction with servers. This means that client-side applications are doing more of the heavy lifting than ever before—and relying on complex asynchronous code to function correctly within the browser.

Because errors and performance issues often involve browser code, many user interactions aren't recorded in server-side logs. Software teams have limited visibility into what is actually happening in a user’s browser—unless they’re incorporating RUM.

RUM measures and analyzes browser events that impact your users, including page load time, perceived performance data (user satisfaction), JavaScript errors, AJAX requests, and more. By getting a complete picture of how your system is performing for end users, you can ensure your customers are getting the best experience possible.

What’s the difference between real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring uses simulated users to measure how your website is performing. For example, you can use both real user and synthetic monitoring to track the average HTTP request time on your site. While RUM will base its metrics on end-user HTTP requests, synthetic monitoring involves using a headless browser to measure how long each HTTP request takes.

Learn more about synthetic monitoring.

Real user monitoring benefits

Real user monitoring (RUM) isn’t just a technical tool; it's a strategic asset that can significantly impact a business's success in the digital landscape. Here's a closer look at the key benefits that organizations can derive from implementing RUM:

1. Improved user experience. RUM provides unparalleled real-time insights into how users interact with your website or application. Understanding the user experience lets businesses identify pain points, optimize workflows, and enhance overall user satisfaction. 

2. Faster issue resolution. Traditional performance monitoring tools may not capture user issues in real-world scenarios. RUM allows organizations to quickly detect and address performance bottlenecks, errors, and usability issues as they occur, minimizing downtime and improving overall system reliability.

3. Enhanced conversion rates. In the competitive world of ecommerce and online services, every second counts. RUM helps identify and rectify performance issues that could hinder the user journey, such as slow page loads or checkout process delays. Improving these aspects can lead to higher conversion rates, positively impacting the bottom line.

4. Data-driven decision making. RUM generates valuable data about user behavior, preferences, and platform performance. This data gives decision-makers actionable insights to make informed choices about feature enhancements, infrastructure investments, and overall digital strategy and experience.

5. Proactive performance optimization. With RUM, organizations can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive performance optimization. By analyzing user interactions and performance metrics, businesses can identify trends and potential issues before they impact a broader user base, allowing for strategic improvements and resource allocation.

6. Tailored content and features. RUM provides insights into how users navigate your digital platforms and sheds light on what content and features resonate most with your audience. This information lets organizations personalize user experiences, delivering content and features that align with user preferences.

7. Cost optimization. By pinpointing performance inefficiencies, RUM helps organizations optimize resources. Whether it's streamlining server usage, optimizing code, or identifying third-party services causing delays, RUM contributes to more efficient resource allocation, reducing infrastructure costs.

Challenges of real user monitoring

With the variety of data and content, variability of networks users run on, their browsers, and the users themselves, RUM has its challenges. Here are some important ones to consider:

1.  Generating a baseline. To gain deeper insights into typical vs. unusual site activity, you need to have a starting baseline—and that can be difficult to generate. RUM needs users to actively engage with your services. The more users, the better the data. RUM relies on data from lots of real-time, active users to gain critical insight. Without those users, it can be difficult to understand how an initial launch of a new service is performing, because you won’t have a lot of RUM data to start with as a baseline. RUM needs to collect data from many users over time to provide valuable insights. Synthetic monitoring can help to fill the gaps when launching new services.

 2.  Doesn’t help in pre-production and testing. RUM monitors real users in real time within a real production environment. With this in mind, RUM might not be helpful during development and testing stages to predict users’ experiences with your site. However, synthetic monitoring and testing can provide helpful information to production teams prior to launching new services. 

3.  Too much data. Real-time user monitoring of lots of users can generate massive amounts of data across a web property. Without a RUM platform and associated tools that can scale, process, and visualize data quickly, your time to insight might be too slow to formulate a response plan and solve problems before they impact your customers.

4.  Limited visibility of user’s context. RUM data reporting happens “in the moment.” It may not provide the necessary visibility into the context of the user’s experience. Without the ability to replay a user’s session from your RUM platform, you can miss critical information surrounding the user’s experience that’s necessary to address a problem.

Learn more about session replay.

What metrics can a RUM monitoring solution track?

A RUM platform tracks and analyzes client-side performance. A good RUM solution tracks the following:

• Timing and performance measurements: By using the Navigation Timing API and cookies, RUM solutions collect client-side performance data, including the time it takes to load and unload documents, overall web page performance, and browser load operations. These include Google’s Core Web Vitals, such as the time it takes to load the first contentful paint and the largest contentful paint.
• Golden signals: It’s important to monitor the four golden signals, which are latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. For instance, New Relic Lookout provides a dashboard that shows deviations in golden signals with no additional configuration required.
• Transaction times: With RUM, you get insights into how long each user transaction is taking, including AJAX and HTTP requests.
• User satisfaction: Apdex measures a user’s satisfaction with the response time of your web applications. You can set your own Apdex thresholds based on your own criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Single-page application (SPA) performance: Track how your SPAs are performing, including initial page load and route change performance details.
• JavaScript errors: Information about any JavaScript errors that are occurring in the end user’s browser.
• Basic end-user information: Details include web browser type and version, device type, operating system, and geographic location based on IP address.

How to set up real user monitoring

RUM is most effective when included as part of a digital experience monitoring (DEM) package. A fully integrated DEM solution is often incorporated within an application performance management (APM) or observability platform to deliver unmatched value by offering complete visibility into the entire customer experience, spanning from frontend user interactions to backend services and infrastructure. By seamlessly connecting these layers, such solutions ensure a more thorough understanding of performance issues and user behavior, enabling teams to optimize and enhance the entire customer journey. 

Setting up RUM requires you to implement the following.

1. Choose your RUM platform. This is the most important step in setting up RUM on your web properties. Because business operations and web site designs vary widely, you should select a platform that’s flexible enough to instrument all your code as needed, easily scales to accommodate expected growth, is fast enough to process data quickly, and provides clear, insightful dashboards.
    
2.  Instrument your code. Instrumentation is adding an agent to your application code. With the number of areas in your site to be instrumented, this needs to be easy and quick to complete. You can instrument browser monitoring with the New Relic platform in just a few minutes. The agent is a snippet of JavaScript that you add to your frontend code, injecting it inline into the <head> of a JavaScript page. Adding it to the head ensures it will load before other scripts.
   
   The browser monitoring script captures basic information about the end user’s experience. When a user interacts with a web page that includes the script, the agent collects that interaction data and sends it back to your RUM platform, where it can take the form of logs, metrics, traces, and events.
    
3. Set up alerts. Set up alerts so your teams are notified when issues arise. For instance, you could set an alert to trigger based on the percentage of transactions that are causing errors or the average HTTP response time.
4. Adapt your dashboards. RUM platforms such as New Relic come with built-in dashboards that display typical metrics related to the user experience, such as page load times. New Relic’s RUM platform also allows you to build custom dashboards based on the metrics that matter most to you, so you can quickly identify issues and gain important insight about your web properties.

Real user monitoring best practices

Implementing RUM is a decisive step toward understanding and optimizing the user experience on your digital platforms. To maximize the effectiveness of RUM, consider the following best practices:

For a detailed guide on setting up and optimizing RUM, refer to New Relic's browser monitoring best practices guide.

1. Define clear objectives. Start by clearly defining your objectives for implementing RUM. Whether it's reducing page load times, minimizing error rates, or enhancing user satisfaction, having well-defined goals will guide your RUM strategy effectively.

2. Prioritize key user journeys. Identify and prioritize critical user journeys within your application or website. Concentrate your RUM efforts on monitoring and optimizing the most crucial paths for users, such as registration processes, product searches, or checkout flows.

3. Implement thoughtful instrumentation. Carefully instrument your web pages or applications with RUM tags. Avoid unnecessary scripts and ensure the instrumentation process aligns with your website's architecture. Use asynchronous loading to minimize any impact on page load times.

4. Regularly review and analyze data. Schedule regular reviews of RUM data to stay informed about user trends, performance metrics, and potential issues. Consistent analysis enables you to make data-driven decisions and respond proactively to emerging challenges.

5. Monitor third-party services. Identify and monitor the performance of third-party services, such as analytics tools, ads, or social media integrations. Third-party services can impact overall website performance, and RUM helps you pinpoint and address any issues they may cause.

6. Integrate with APM and logging solutions. Integrate RUM data with APM tools and logging solutions. This integration provides a holistic view of your digital ecosystem, allowing you to identify and address performance issues comprehensively by combining user-centric and server-side metrics.