Real User Monitoring (RUM) has been providing valuable insights into real user experiences for many years. It’s not every day that we see a new player enter the market, but last week we did, and a very powerful player at that – Amazon. Real User Monitoring for Amazon CloudWatch was announced at AWS re:Invent 2021, adding to their existing suite of over 200 products and services. As you can imagine, our ears perked up at this announcement and we’re eager to take a look.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides visibility into the performance experience of live users interacting with your web, mobile, or single-page apps. RUM tools emerged to bridge the gap between application performance metrics and the impact on real people. These days, user experience is increasingly factored into the development process, but that still doesn’t stop slowdowns.

In the first post of this two-part series, we talked about the need to fully understand how users experience your website. Without understanding how your end users interact with your site’s pages—what’s working for them and what’s not—you’d be optimizing on a hunch without solid data to guide you.

Technology environments are rapidly evolving as organizations look to remain competitive, accelerate innovation and make themselves more agile. But in the process, many of the observers, i.e., stakeholders who track infrastructure and application metrics, are falling behind, unable to monitor and manage modern, cloud-native apps and multi-cloud environments due to the complexity that comes with them.

With a 70% increase in internet usage, and digital teams adopting cloud-native technologies at a rapid rate, the importance of measuring customer experience on digital properties is not just a technical problem, but a business imperative. Frontend developers and SREs use Real User Monitoring (RUM) to understand critical components of their end-user experience, like how quickly users see content, when a page becomes interactive, and a page's visual stability.

Three seconds is all it takes before your customer decides to leave. Would you imagine that! The audacity of some people! But, can you really blame them? We live in a fast-paced world. Wasting people’s time is worse than wasting their money. Developers are striving to provide value in as short of time as possible. Just as I am now writing this tutorial. I’m adamant about not wasting your time but providing you with concrete info for you to learn something new.

Since its release in 2013, React.js has become one of the most popular solutions for building dynamic, highly interactive web app frontends. React’s declarative nature and component-based architecture make it easier to build and maintain single-page applications.

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring are the most important tools in your performance toolbox. But they do different things and are useful at different times and many developers only spend time mastering one of these tools and only see a part of their performance problems, like trying to hammer in a screw. Let’s look at these tools, what they measure, and when to use them.