Sign in Subscribe
Software Engineering

Real User Monitoring

Venkatesan Ramachandran

• 4 min read
Real User Monitoring
Photo by Luke Chesser / Unsplash

What is Real User Monitoring?
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a type of performance monitoring that enables organizations to track and analyze how users interact with their applications in real-time. It helps to identify problems quickly and uncover user experience issues before they become serious. RUM provides valuable insights into the performance of an application from the user's perspective, allowing developers to understand how their applications are behaving in the wild. This gives them the ability to proactively identify, diagnose, and fix problems that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Why it is important?
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is an important tool for understanding how online users interact with websites and applications. It provides essential insights into user experience, performance, and usability issues that can help improve the overall user experience. RUM allows businesses to monitor the user journey from start to finish, providing valuable performance data in real-time. This data can be used to identify problems and optimize the user experience, which leads to increased customer satisfaction, conversions, and revenue. Additionally, RUM can provide insights into customer behavior that are not available with traditional analytics tools.

Objectives & Goals of Real User Monitoring
Objectives:

  1. Measure user experience in real-time, including page loading times, response times, and error rates.
  2. Analyze user behavior to identify any potential issues for further investigation.
  3. Identify opportunities for improvement and optimization of the user experience.
  4. Monitor application performance over time to identify any trends or changes in user behavior that may require further attention.
  5. Generate reports and insights to inform decisions about application development and maintenance efforts.

Goals:

  1. To improve overall user experience by monitoring performance, reliability, and usability issues in real-time.
  2. To identify and troubleshoot problems before they affect customers or cause outages or downtime for the application service provider(s).
  3. To identify opportunities for optimization and improvement in order to enhance the user experience.
  4. To provide data-driven insights to inform development and maintenance efforts.

Steps to implement real user monitoring

  1. Define Your Goals: Before implementing Real User Monitoring (RUM), you need to define the goals you want to achieve by using this system. Consider what metrics you wish to track, and how you will use the data collected for optimization.
  2. Choose a Tool: Select a RUM tool that best meets your needs and integrates with your existing technology stack. There are many solutions available, including open-source options.
  3. Implement Tracking: Integrate the chosen RUM service into your webpages by adding the necessary scripts to each page or application you wish to monitor. This will enable the RUM system to collect performance data from users interacting with your website or application.
  4. Configure Alerts and Reports: Set up alerts and reports within  your RUM tool so that you can be notified when performance issues occur. Additionally, set up reports to track the performance of your website or application over time.
  5. Monitor and Optimize: Use the data from your RUM system to identify areas of improvement and optimize your website or application for a better user experience.  Additionally, use the data to identify any potential performance issues before they become problems.

List of Thresholds Alerts and Reports for Real User Monitoring
Threshold Alerts

  1. Slow load times: Alert when a page or application takes longer than a specified amount of time to load.
  2. High response times: Alert when the response time for a page or application exceeds a preset threshold.
  3. High error rates: Alert when the error rate for a page or application is greater than a set limit.
  4. High abandonment rates: Alert when the abandonment rate (the percentage of users who leave before completing an action) is higher than allowed.
  5. Low conversion rates: Alert when the conversion rate (the percentage of users who complete an action) drops below an expected level.
  6. Low engagement levels: Alert when user engagement (measured by time spent on pages, clicks, etc.) is lower  than expected.

Reports

  1. Load time reports: Generate reports showing the average load time for a page or application over a specified period of time.
  2. Response time reports: Generate reports showing the average response time for a page or application over a specified period of time.
  3. Error rate reports: Generate reports showing the average error rate for a page or application over a specified period of time.
  4. Abandonment rate reports: Generate reports showing the average abandonment rate (the percentage of users who leave before completing an action) over a specified period of time.
  5. Conversion rate reports: Generate reports showing the average conversion rate (the percentage of users who complete an action) over a specified period of time.
  6. Engagement level reports: Generate reports showing the average user engagement (measured by time spent on pages, clicks, etc.) over a specified period of time.
  7. User cohort reports: Generate reports showing the average user behavior of a specific group of users (based on location, device type, etc.) over a specified period of time.
  8. Retention rate reports: Generate reports showing the average user retention rate (the percentage of users who return to the site multiple times) over a specified period of time.
  9. Funnel analysis reports: Generate reports showing the average user flow through a specified funnel over a specified period of time.
  10. Session replay reports: Generate reports showing the average user session replays (to identify areas of difficulty or confusion) over a specified period of time.

List of Metrics to measure in Real User Monitoring

  1. Page Load Time: This metric measures how long it takes for a page to fully load on a user's device.
  2. User Retention: This metric measures the percentage of users who return to the website or application over time.
  3. Error Rate: This metric measures the amount of errors that are encountered by users while they interact with the application or website.
  4. Server Response Time: This metric measures how quickly the server responds to requests from a user's device.
  5. User Engagement: This metric measures how engaged users are with the website or application, such as how long they spend on each page and how often they return to the site over time.
  6. Conversion Rate: This metric measures how successful a website or application is in converting users into customers.
  7. Page Views: This metric measures the total number of pageviews over time on a website or application.
  8. Bounce Rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors that leave a website without taking any further action after arriving on a page.
  9. Session Duration: This metric measures the average amount of time spent by users on a website or application during each session.
  10. Heat Maps: This metric measures how users are interacting with a website or application, such as which areas of the page they click most often and how far down they scroll on each page.

Top 10 tools available to perform real user monitoring

  1. New Relic Real User Monitoring
  2. AppDynamics Real User Monitoring
  3. Dynatrace Synthetic and Real User Monitoring
  4. Google Analytics Real Time User Monitoring
  5. Splunk Enterprise Real User Monitoring
  6. Sumo Logic Real User Monitoring
  7. Catchpoint Real User Monitoring
  8. SOASTA CloudTest Live Real-User Testing
  9. Akamai mPulse Real-User Monitoring Tool
  10. Webtrekk Real-Time Visitor Monitoring

Sign up for more like this.

Enter your email
Subscribe