Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a method of web performance monitoring that captures user experience metrics on visitors to your website. It is also known as real user metrics, end-user experience monitoring, or simply user monitoring. You can think of Real User Monitoring as an automated way to get user feedback on your website. Not every user will complete a survey or fill out a feedback form, but RUM listens to each one of your users.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is passive website monitoring that has already been used widely for two decades. Large enterprises adopted it first because they had the capital to deploy their own system. But with RUM solutions, like Uptime.com provides, it is affordable for even small businesses. While this is not a new technology, it is new to those businesses that haven’t used it before.
Three seconds is a very important number for website owners. They know that 50% of visitors will leave their website if it doesn’t load in that time. Website developers spend a lot of time optimizing and refactoring code so that it runs more quickly and provides a better user experience. User experience is something that monitoring only uptime won’t tell you. A website might be up, but if it takes 10 seconds to load, customers will bounce.
React Native has become the predominant development framework for cross-platform mobile applications. By interacting with native APIs largely under the hood and requiring only a fractional proportion of platform-specific code, it allows you to build applications for iOS, Android, and the browser using the same declarative JavaScript. But this cross-platform adaptability has its downsides.
Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides end-to-end visibility into the user experience and performance of your browser and mobile applications. RUM allows you to capture and retain complete user sessions for 30 days. This means you can pinpoint bugs, prioritize issues, and determine fixes with data collected across an entire quarter.
Hopefully by now you’re taken your first sip of Elastic RUM, or real user monitoring, and see the power of searching through traces and the User Experience metrics to gain insights into how users actually use and experience your application. One issue you may have experienced is the challenge of finding the source of errors for minified JavaScript files.
