What Is Real-Time User Monitoring?

Real-time user monitoring is a technology that collects data about user interactions with websites, applications, and mobile apps. As a vital tool for web monitoring and application performance monitoring (APM), real-time user monitoring provides clear insight into how well sites and apps perform in real-world interactions, and how IT teams can improve websites and applications to enhance user experiences.

Real user monitoring tools analyze everything from page load speeds to user behavior, helping developers and IT administrators better understand user behavior and how well sites and apps are delivering high-quality user experiences.

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 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 and observability platforms to provide comprehensive insights into the performance of web applications and end-user experiences.

Real-time user monitoring tracks a wide range of metrics — everything from the number of page views to complex KPIs that reveal trends in user behavior.

• Application Performance Index (Apdex) is a measurement of user satisfaction based on the response time of requests as the user interacts with a website or application.

• Page load time measures the time that a web page takes to fully load within a browser.

• Active users is a count of the number of live connections to a website during a given period.

• Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave a website immediately after landing on one of its pages. A high bounce rate indicates some kind of failure to engage users or meet their expectations.

• Transaction times provide an average of how long each user transaction takes, including AJAX and HTTP requests.

• Time to first byte (TTFB) tracks the amount of time from when a user or browser first makes an HTTP request to when the first byte of the page is received. A high TTFB indicates a problem with server response time.

• Start render time measures the time required for a page to begin rendering on the screen, giving an indication of perceived performance.

• Session duration is the length of time a user spends on an application or website in a single session, providing insight into the relevance of content and the quality of engagement.

• Click-through rate (CTR) measures how often users click on links, buttons, and other page elements, providing insight into how compelling the content and visuals are.

• JavaScript errors identify front-end errors in the user’s browser that may negatively impact the user experience.

• API errors track failure in API calls, which may suggest problems with server resources or third-party services.

• Resource load failures uncover issues in loading resources like images, CSS files, or scripts.

• Geographic performance measures how well apps and websites perform for users in different regions and countries.

• Connection speed tracks how fast connections are over different networks, enabling IT teams to optimize for slower connections.

• User interactions track the path that users take through an application or website, helping IT teams to better understand how to optimize conversion journeys and user experiences.

As a digital experience monitoring tool, RUM technology can accomplish a broad range of objectives.

• Optimizing user experiences: By analyzing user interactions and performance metrics, web development teams and administrators can enhance user and customer experiences as they interact with websites and apps on different device types, over different networks, and from different geographical locations. This is especially important for mobile device optimization, as a growing number of users interact with sites and apps on tablets and smartphones.

• Improving conversion rates: Real-user experience monitoring tools provide insights into how to optimize user journeys, eliminate friction, and reduce abandonment to increase conversions.

• Fixing errors fast: By getting real-time alerts when errors occur, IT teams can troubleshoot errors faster while improving the overall stability and reliability of websites and applications.

• Analyzing the effectiveness of content and features: Development teams use RUM to track how users interact with different features and content, which elements attract the most engagement, and where user behavior indicates a problem to be fixed.

• Ensuring high performance across geographies: By monitoring the performance of web apps and websites for users in different locations, teams can optimize content delivery and address local infrastructure limitations to ensure a consistent experience for all users.

• Improving compliance: Compliance teams use real-time user monitoring to ensure that apps and websites are meeting regulatory requirements and exceeding the performance expectations established by service-level agreements (SLAs).

• Reducing costs: RUM tools reduce infrastructure costs by pinpointing inefficiencies, streamlining server usage, optimizing code, and identifying delays caused by third-party services.

Real-time user monitoring and synthetic monitoring offer two different but complementary approaches to testing websites, web applications, and mobile applications.

Synthetic testing evaluates performance by running scripts in a controlled environment to simulate user actions on websites and applications. Synthetic testing enables consistent testing over time, providing a baseline of performance data. Teams use synthetic testing to proactively search for issues and test expected user experiences, like revealing performance bottlenecks or consistent latency in page loads. Synthetic monitoring can be especially effective in regression testing after teams have made significant changes or updates to a website or app.

In contrast, real-time user monitoring tracks the experience of actual users in the kind of real-world scenarios that synthetic tests may not anticipate. RUM offers end-to-end visibility into the user journey, providing data on front-end usability and back-end functionality. RUM data can provide a true picture of how apps and sites are used in the real world and help diagnose the root cause of performance issues in complex user interactions like checkout processes.

When considering the benefits of RUM vs synthetic testing , many organizations choose to deploy both methods to conduct more comprehensive application and website performance tests.