What Is RUM Monitoring?

Real user monitoring (RUM), aka RUM monitoring, is a web and application monitoring process that captures and analyzes every user interaction with a website, web application, or mobile application in real time. In contrast to synthetic monitoring, which simulates user interactions, RUM monitoring collects data from actual users as they navigate websites and interact with applications. This approach provides unique insights into the performance, functionality, and quality of user experience from the perspective of real users under real-world conditions.

As the business world has moved online, websites, web apps, and mobile apps have become mission-critical technologies for selling products and services, communicating with employees and customers, and managing business operations. When these technologies work well, they build stronger relationships with customers, improve public perception of the brand, increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace, and boost the bottom line. Conversely, when websites load too slowly or applications don’t work as expected, a poor user experience can drive customers away, damage the brand, hurt sales, and cause a company to lose business opportunities.

Along with other digital experience monitoring solutions, RUM monitoring such as Akamai mPulse enables development teams and administrators to constantly track the performance of sites and applications. With the ability to understand how well these technologies are working, companies can continually improve them to enhance the customer experience. They can fix issues and bugs before they impact users and customers. And they can optimize websites and applications to increase efficiency and maximize revenue.

Here’s how a RUM end-user experience monitoring solution works:

• Collecting data: Real user monitoring solutions collect performance data by installing lightweight software components like JavaScript snippets on servers and devices or SDKs within applications. RUM tools can also collect data through APIs from cloud services, network devices, and third-party applications.
• Transmitting data: As users interact with websites and apps, RUM data is transmitted to a central system to provide real-time or near-real-time observability.
• Analysis: Advanced algorithms and analysis help interpret the data and provide a comprehensive view of interactions.
• Alerting: RUM monitoring tools can also alert IT teams to performance issues or problems with user experiences. This allows IT teams to respond quickly to potential issues before they escalate or impact users.
• Visualizing: RUM monitoring tools frequently provide customizable dashboards that offer visual representations of data. Live data feeds provide real-time overviews of system performance and health.
• Troubleshooting: RUM monitoring solutions include features that help diagnose and troubleshoot bugs and issues. These may include log management and analysis, transaction tracing, and performance profiling.
• Integrating: To provide a comprehensive understanding of web performance and to resolve issues more quickly, most RUM monitoring tools will integrate easily with other IT systems like incident management systems and automation tools.

Real-time user monitoring tools, such as Akamai mPulse, help DevOps, development teams, and IT administrators to uncover a wide range of issues that might not be visible via traditional testing methods or synthetic testing.

• Performance issues: RUM monitoring can identify problems with page load times, network or server latency in specific geographic locations, and bottlenecks in both front-end and back-end systems that degrade the user experience.
• Functionality issues: RUM technology captures JavaScript errors that can break functionality or degrade experiences, issues with AJAX calls that affect application functionality and loading of dynamic content, and API failures that impact app performance and functionality.
• Usability and user experience problems: RUM enables IT teams to identify problems with how quickly pages load, how well they render on users’ screens, how easy it is to interact with them, and where users face issues during critical workflows like checkout or sign-up processes.
• Engagement and behavior insights: By tracking the interactions of real users, RUM monitoring can uncover pages with unexpectedly low engagement or high bounce rates, or identify features that are underutilized or problematic.
• Technical and infrastructure insights: Real user monitoring can find issues that are specific to certain device types or browsers, problems caused by third-party scripts or services, and issues related to loading resources like images, CSS files, or JavaScript files that aren’t optimized for performance.
• Operational and monitoring gaps: RUM can highlight critical issues that aren’t triggering alerts and provide comprehensive visibility into areas not adequately covered by traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools.

RUM monitoring solutions can capture comprehensive real user metrics and data about website and application performance.

Performance metrics

• Page load time: The time it takes a page to load completely and become fully interactive — a critical metric for user satisfaction and SEO rankings.
• Time to first byte (TTFB): The time from the user’s request to the moment the first byte of a response is received from the server — a measure of back-end performance.
• Core Web Vitals: Key metrics defined by Google that impact user experiences and SEO.
  
• API response time: The speed at which APIs respond to requests, affecting the functionality and responsiveness of web applications.

User experience metrics

• Session duration: The amount of time a user spends in the app or on a website — a measure of engagement.
  
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page — a measure of content relevance and landing page quality.
• User journey: The path that users take through an application or website — this helps to optimize conversion routes and uncover potential performance bottlenecks.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of users who take a desired action like making a purchase or downloading content — a measure of the effectiveness of features in a web page or app.

Reliability metrics

• Error rate: A measure of how often users encounter errors, including front-end JavaScript errors, back-end errors, and failed API calls.
• Uptime/downtime: The percentage of time an application or service is available — this is often used to demonstrate compliance with service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Crash report: The number of times a mobile app crashes — a measure of stability.

Infrastructure metrics

• Resource utilization: These metrics track CPU, memory, and disk usage metrics — a measure of the health of back-end infrastructure.
• Network latency: These metrics monitor delays in transmitting data over the network that affect user experience, especially in geographically distributed applications.

Engagement metrics

• Page views: The number of pages viewed on a website — a measure of the depth of engagement with a site.
• Active users: The number of active users over a specific period — a measure of popularity and user retention.

Real user monitoring tools provide many advantages for organizations and their development IT team.

• Improve user experiences: Users expect websites and applications to work quickly, easily, and seamlessly. RUM monitoring enables organizations to optimize processes and solve issues that deliver exceptional experiences.
• Increase engagement and retention: Users are more likely to engage with and return to sites and applications that work well.
• Boost conversion rates: For ecommerce sites and online services, faster and better performance has a direct impact on conversion rates.
• Enhance search engine rankings: Many search engines, including Google, factor performance into the ranking algorithms for search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Reduce operational costs: By optimizing application and website performance, organizations can reduce operational costs related to procuring bandwidth and computing power.
• Improve brand perception: High-performing applications and websites improve the way that a brand is perceived by users and customers.
• Simplify scalability: Optimization with RUM monitoring prepares systems to better handle rapid growth or spikes in traffic.
• Achieve competitive advantage: By helping to provide faster and more reliable user experiences, RUM gives businesses an edge on their competition.
• Streamline compliance: RUM monitoring tools help to uncover the root cause of issues with websites and applications that may jeopardize compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
• Enhance mobile experiences: As more users interact with websites and applications on smartphones and tablets, RUM solutions can help these devices overcome variable network conditions to optimize performance.
• Prevent security breaches: Real-time monitoring can detect unusual patterns or activities that may indicate security threats such as brute-force attacks, helping security teams to quickly stop potential breaches.