Know More about Real User Monitoring and its Best Practices

What is Real User Monitoring?

Real User Monitoring is a passive method of collecting and reporting data. Moreover, the data belongs to the actual website users to monitor the performance of the site. 

RUM is a service to passively collect performance data from the end-user and their browsers. For instance, when a user connects to the site, it uses web services to create reports based on the footprints of the visitor on that page. 

In addition, the reports offer DevOps information regarding the performance of the site. Hence, elements like location, device, OS, and browser are pivotal information about any user.

Further, RUM helps identify issues that occur due to updates and upgrades on a site. Therefore, the best practices in Real User Monitoring can help businesses understand their user behavior.

Key Components of Real User Monitoring

Firstly, RUM generates reports to examine user interactions in the mobile, cloud, and web-based applications. Secondly, the report frames key application metrics. Most importantly, the metrics help identify, troubleshoot, and repair issues in system infrastructure.

As a result, to handle the issues here are the key components of RUM that help track solutions: 

• Capturing:

  It refers to an application monitoring system that uses RUM data from various sources. For instance, JavaScript records information in web browsers, load balancers, passive network taps, or server logs.
  Moreover, the application monitoring system captures information like JSON. It also captures requests for pages and various resources. Above all, there can be a request for the data even if it is hosted on a different website.
  

• Sessionization:

  Sessionization is the process to reassemble data according to the components and pages a user visits at certain times. Moreover, the data consists of website hits and is stored in a database.
  Consequently, it reorganizes captured information into various records of each visit. As a result, these records are divided on the basis of pages, page components, timing & duration.
  

• Problem Detection:

  It is pivotal to examine and analyze objects, visits, and pages. Therefore, it helps avoid unexpected occurrences like errors, navigation issues, slow processing, etc.
  Most importantly, analysis for all objects, pages, and sessions can avoid unusual behavior and errors.
  

• Individual Visit Reporting:

  Records of information and reviews of individual visits are easy for tech teams to recreate with RUM. Moreover, the disposition of visits depends on the solution. Some solutions may provide summaries, while others can replay the screens to match the appearance on the visitor’s device.
  As a result, the information can help tech teams to delve deep into the recreation of sessions. Hence, providing them deeper insights to analyze aspects that affect the user experience.

• Reporting and Segmentation:

  An important component of RUM is the ability to observe aggregated data. The data includes the performance of an application on certain browser versions, the availability of the page, etc.
  As a result, analyzing aggregated information helps monitor any issues with the availability and performance influenced by browser types or user segments.

• Alerting:

  Finally, comes the component of alerting. It relies on RUM to notify the development team of any urgent issues.
  Moreover, it uses inbuilt monitoring systems to detect an issue in a timely manner. It is especially helpful when a system does not implement specialized monitoring tools. Therefore, in case any serious issues occur, the system activates a warning mechanism. Hence, alerting authorized teams to rapidly resolve the problem.

Understanding the Examples of Real User Monitoring

The best practices in Real User Monitoring help monitor applications and websites that identify problems that other testing methods cannot detect. Hence, here are some real-world examples of RUM: 

• Constantly monitoring blog pages in the background to detect when and where a page load time increases. That is to say, developers may observe that during prime time.
  Hence, it may increase timeouts due to traffic spikes. As a result, leading to visitor and user dissatisfaction and lower ranking in Google.
• Moreover, it identifies intermittent issues that occur in an end-user portal like banking software systems. 
• For instance, using RUM helps tech leads assess the health of applications.
• App developers can also focus on failures that occur on different platforms that may not manifest in pre-deployment testing.
• The development team can certainly use RUM to troubleshoot issues that occur due to deployment.
• Above all, product managers that lack coding expertise can detect the performances of high-priority pages. Hence, RUM tools provide dashboards that help efficiently allocate resources to solve problems.

Benefits of Applying the Best Practices of Real User Monitoring

• RUM certainly provides complete visibility into the performance of software, website, and application. Hence, it allows tech teams to observe and experience the apps and websites the way users do. 
• For instance, when an issue occurs, developers spend their time probing for issues in performances. Moreover, engineers are an expensive tool for the business. Therefore, by applying the best practices in Real User Monitoring, engineers can focus on creating new products and solutions.
• Moreover, lead engineers need to prioritize fixes as one of their responsibilities. Hence, with RUM monitoring and identifying, issues on high-value pages become easier with high-level charts. That is to say, this allows engineers to quickly detect the health of websites and applications.
• Above all, applying the best practices in Real User Monitoring can help reduce the cost of acquiring new customers. 
• Furthermore, RUM tools play an important role in visualizing various levels of data. Therefore, tech teams can easily comprehend data using customizable dashboards.
• Most importantly, RUM enhances the experience of the website and mobile visitors, and customers. It certainly allows teams to fix problems at a faster pace, sometimes even before a user reports the issue.

Limitations that occur while using Real User Monitoring

• RUM is unable to determine the data on the third-party cloud and SaaS platforms when users use them. As a result, it creates issues when tech teams want to observe those systems to detect any problems that may occur.
• Above all, RUM can only detect problems when a user experiences them. Therefore, it does not detect an issue with a robot or dummy user. Hence, when an outage occurs, it affects the user experience.

Here are the Best Practices of Real User Monitoring that Businesses should apply:

Businesses can adopt a variety of practices when it comes to RUM. Although it is critical to choose the Real User Monitoring practices best suited for the services or products.  

Testing the Performance of New Solutions and Features

One of the best practices in Real User Monitoring, is to test the solutions and their features before deployment. As a result, it allows tech teams to determine the performance of the solution. Hence, providing opportunities to fix any bugs or issues that may hamper a user’s experience. 

Moreover, it is always a possibility that a user could end up using the solution or feature. Therefore, it is recommended to prepare the website or application for an interactive user encounter.

Sharing Actionable Data with Marketing Teams

Although RUM is an important tool for DevOps to manage a website or application, it is not just limited to a single team. 

RUM is also pivotal for marketing teams. Therefore, here are a few benefits of applying practices of Real User Monitoring for best results:

• Using RUM to comprehend the most used features for digital marketing campaigns. Hence, gaining insights for better targeting, communication, and conversions. 
• Further, in case of any issues that arise might have an adverse effect on campaigns. Hence, to prevent a bad user experience marketing teams can pause the particular paid campaign until it is fixed.
• Moreover, marketing teams can communicate with the customers and users regarding the downtime. As a result, reducing the loss of visitors due to a performance-related error.
• Above all, it helps improve the user’s experience by improving the performance and working on various feedback.

Collaborating RUM Solutions

Another one of the best practices in Real User Monitoring is to collaborate the solutions with transaction tracing, log management, and infrastructure monitoring. Hence, allowing flexibility to troubleshoot, identify bottlenecks, and arrange large data sets.

Moreover, it enables correlating metrics and logs and monitors end-user experience to detect slow transactions. Therefore, a unified solution provides better and quicker actionable insights.

Mitigate the Impact of Performance Issues

It is certainly pivotal to improve performance management that mitigates the risk of bounce rates. As a result, enhancing the rate of conversions.

Most importantly, a faster website will definitely make more business than a slower one. Hence, influencing customer behavior through engagement can help with the retention and adoption of the solutions provided by a business.

Assess Website Performance and Apply it to the Business

It is also necessary to observe the performance of a website that leads to higher customer engagement. As a result, the faster the website, the more users it engages. Hence, it is important to comprehend the load time of the data on the website.

Moreover, RUM tools must begin with understanding business objectives. Hence, relating the data to meet customer expectations and target users accordingly. As a result, making more use of the dashboard already represents progress.

Generate Data that helps RevOps and BizOps

An operations function takes care of systems, processes, and data. As a result, the same is critical for customer-facing functions in any business.

Moreover, an operations team helps smoothen the process to maintain the flow of traffic at optimal efficiency. Hence, RUM solutions generate and gather data that help meet targets for user satisfaction.