Real User Monitoring, also known as End User Monitoring or RUM, is a way of monitoring the client side portions of an application. Real User Monitoring for JavaScript allows developers to have access to key metrics for load times and user paths being used in production as part of their application performance management (APM).

A broken or poor performing XHR can significantly impact a user’s experience with a page by slowing down the load time or causing it to break entirely. Many of our customers monitoring web applications agree that monitoring and optimizing XHR calls is the biggest lever they have to improve application performance. In April of this year, we announced that Raygun Real User Monitoring can now surface analytics into the response codes from XHR calls.

According to a report by Google, mobile users abandon webpages if the load time is more than three seconds. In other words, even a fractionally slower website will lead to a bad user experience and increased bounce rates. Today’s users are more demanding and expect near-instantaneous load times and seamless experiences. If you can’t meet their expectations, they’ll find other websites or applications capable of providing a better experience.

Monitoring trends in application performance helps you identify poor performance and visualize the impact of performance optimizations you’ve made. To help you better monitor performance trends, we’ve released a new line graph now available across all performance details pages in Real User Monitoring.

As applications evolve, we may start to lose visibility into why things are slow. Web apps often suffer in silence as customers are more likely to leave when they’re unsatisfied rather than reach out. Complex user flows, resource-intensive API calls, and an ever-growing codebase can all contribute to poor performance. This is why we don’t have scheduled performance days.

From gaming and social media to e-commerce and travel, mobile is reshaping the way businesses operate and engage with their customers. In an increasingly competitive market, ensuring your mobile applications stay highly performant and resilient will be critical in differentiating yourself from the crowd as well as avoiding uninstalls and poor app reviews.

As modern development practices evolve at rapid rates we must stay focused on what makes for a great experience; fast, flawless software. In the pursuit of building fast, performant software, you’ve likely come across performance monitoring products like Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM). In this article, we go deeper into how using RUM and APM can help you and your team build better software experiences.

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed a couple of key trends in the performance monitoring space. Adoption of single-page applications (SPAs) has continued to grow and as such performance monitoring is evolving. SPAs don’t offer the same existing web metrics like load time or first paint from the browser performance API. As a result, developers require more flexibility to track the metrics that matter to their end-users and business.

Earlier in the year, we launched the request details page in Raygun Real User Monitoring. This update brought the instance-level insights into page performance to help you understand exactly what caused poor performance and how to improve it. To complement instance-level insights, this latest launch brings the Latest slowest requests module to Real User Monitoring. Now, when viewing performance data for a specific URI, you can easily jump into the instance-level diagnostics for a specific slow request.