Real user monitoring

What is real user monitoring?

Real user monitoring (RUM) refers to a suite of web and mobile monitoring features such as user analytics, session replay, feedback solutions, and more. The goal of RUM is to provide insights into how everyday users experience and behave on websites and applications.

In contrast to RUM, quality assurance (QA) processes and solutions attempt to mimic user behavior to identify and resolve potential issues before they affect users. While this can help you optimize the overall quality of your website or application, QA techniques won’t show you exactly what your end users experience.

There are a number of factors that can affect your app’s performance for different users in different ways — geography, network strength, and device type, to name a few. It’s also easy to miss client-side performance problems if you’re relying on traditional error reporting tools, application performance tools, or thinking primarily in terms of your control over and visibility into backend monitoring.

Monitoring real user sessions can give you a much clearer picture of what’s going wrong in your site or app, the actual impact these issues have on users and key business metrics, and what you should do to fix them.

What kind of data is collected by real user monitoring?

Real user monitoring tools collect a wide range of data in real time:

• Passive analytics tools may track metrics related to performance, such as page load speed, JavaScript errors, network response times, Google Lighthouse scores, and more
• Session replay tools may actively monitor each user’s clicks, scrolls, and other information related to their behavior, including pages visited and actions taken
• Feedback solutions like surveys or bug reporting tools prompt users to provide direct responses or general comments about their experience

The solutions you use — and, by extension, the data you collect — will depend on your particular RUM needs. However, it’s typically best to leverage some combination of all three to get the most comprehensive view of how users experience your website or app.

How real user monitoring helps deliver better digital experiences

The insights revealed through real user monitoring can help surface the most impactful opportunities to improve your digital experience for your end users.

Resolve user-reported issues more efficiently

When users report a bug, it can be challenging for them to pinpoint and describe when and how the issue occurred. Typically, you would have to spend time either trying to recreate the error or going back and forth with the user to get more information. This inefficient process can be frustrating for both sides and often doesn’t help engineers find and solve the issue at its source.

Moreover, not all bugs need to be fixed. If an issue affects very few users with no real impact to revenue, it’s likely not worth fixing. Without the necessary context regarding user or business impact, however, it’s often tough to tell whether fixing an issue will waste finite resources or yield a significant improvement to critical user flows.

A truly effective real user monitoring solution will give your team insight into the scale of the problem, as well as the technical context around what’s causing it, so you can determine whether a bug is worth fixing and how to quickly ship a fix.

Discover problems in critical areas of your site or application

As people conduct more and more business online, it’s crucial for businesses to keep up with rising user expectations for near-perfect digital experiences. Those who can’t create and maintain this level of experience will lose customers to those who can. To make things more difficult, users may abandon their sessions without ever triggering any actual error message or alerting your team to the problems they experienced.

Real user monitoring can help you track engagement, app performance, and unreported user issues through conversion funnels and other high-value interaction points. This can help you understand events that cause users to abandon check-out flows, experience bugs or friction, and more. A strong real user monitoring tool will alert you to problem areas, as well as give you context into the issues themselves.

Improve feature adoption and drive business goals

A lot goes into launching a new feature. You want to make sure people are using it and see who’s adopting it. If users aren’t engaging with the feature in the way you’d expect — or at all — you’ll want to know what they’re doing and why. With real user monitoring, you can see exactly that and share the necessary context with your teams for better understanding.

Real user monitoring provides the actionable insights you need to make informed decisions on improving existing features, launching new features, and removing any roadblocks to an ideal user experience. A tool like LogRocket will help you collaborate effectively across teams to deliver better digital experience outcomes and drive business KPIs more efficiently.

Why LogRocket for real user monitoring?

The best real user monitoring tools can help you fix user-reported issues, find issues faster, and improve conversion, engagement, and user experience, but a bad one can do just as much harm as good. With LogRocket, you get:

• Easy set up and use: With a single line of code, engineers, support staff, product managers, designers, and marketers can all get onboarded quickly and start using LogRocket as a single source of truth for prioritizing and addressing issues and opportunities alike.
• Complete session recordings: Capture every session and event you need with high-fidelity session replay that gives you a completely accurate, pixel-perfect picture of user behavior alongside logs and other technical information to help you solve issues at their root and provide a smooth, error-free user experience.
• Issue management: LogRocket ingests JavaScript errors, performance issues, UX issues, and frustrating moments. It then triages them and alerts you to the severe issues affecting user experience and key business goals.
• Security and data privacy: LogRocket automatically obscures personally identifiable information (PII) and private fields such as passwords and credit card info. You can also proactively choose to obscure any other fields or elements, or set them as private by default and whitelist only the fields you want to capture. Any obscured data is blocked from recording at the browser level, so it’s never even ingested.
• Little to no impact on performance: LogRocket’s real user monitoring solution was developed from day one to capture all the necessary data to help you improve your digital experience while minimally impacting performance.

Quickly identify, understand, and resolve problems with your web and mobile apps at their source. Get a complete picture of what’s happening, prioritize and communicate more effectively, and ensure the ideal digital experience for every user.

Try it yourself for free!

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