Real User Monitoring, or RUM, is about measuring the user experience. Not what the user is doing, but what is happening to the user. How is your server performing when the user is making a request? This hidden metric is part of the user’s overall motivation. After all, we all know the frustration of a slow moving website.

This past month was haunted with social media outages, finance, and tech services. DDoS attacks affected entire countries and broadband services in Africa. We’re continuing to see a pattern of outages from social media services with multiple applications. When one of these apps goes down, at least one of the others usually goes as well. The worst of these outages occurred in March, when Facebook’s entire suite of apps went down.

A signup form has a ton of moving parts we often take for granted. There’s the form itself, and the database attached to that form that stores user data. Other databases may need to sync with the form, such as marketing drip emails or coupons. There’s often a thank you page with analytics attached to track goals, that may be gated behind an account. Any of these parts could break and our form might appear to function fine at first glance.

Last year’s ecommerce holiday shopping sales were at an all-time high. According to Adobe, Cyber Monday topped Black Friday with $7.87 billion in sales. While many companies have holiday advertising and marketing strategies in place, is your website optimized to give buyers the best possible shopping experience? We’ve created this handy guide to help you get ready for the mass of online shoppers looking for a deal. The last thing you want is to have a website meltdown on the big day.