Real user monitoring (RUM) - definition & overview

Real user monitoring (RUM) is an important aspect of application performance management that helps capture and analyze every event that your users make within your application or website. It provides real user metrics and measurements that help you gain insight into the user experience and allows you to assess performance and develop important business decisions related to the digital customer experience.

While application performance management is a difficult and complicated task, there are ways that businesses and DevOps teams can make their lives easier. The two most important things when considering application performance are how users are experiencing your application from their end and how readily equipped your team is able to understand and transform data into business insights and strategies.

This is where RUM can be a huge help for your application monitoring and data collection/storage needs.

RUM is a reliable data-collection method because it collects data and performance measures directly from the end user’s browser. Embedded JavaScripts collects data from each event and user, allowing you to transfer and analyze data.

Because of how many data-event transfers are made in any single day, week, or monthly cycle, there is a ton of data to analyze. Fortunately, robots RUM solutions provide data visualization features that make it easier to understand and gain actionable insights across the various measurements, metrics, and charts produced by your solution.

Some of the most common data events captured through a RUM solution include:

• Delays that occurred on the client

• Overall end-to-end transaction times

• Network timings

• Rendering events

• Can perform high-level monitoring, alerting

• Troubleshooting any potential slow-downs

• Geographic locations of users

• User-end operating systems and browsers

• Other comprehensive details about the specific performance of top users

• End-to-end journey of user experience

Some benefits of RUM include the ability to measure Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and indicators with ease and track the entire user journey.

Benefits of RUM

• RUM captures user experiences with your applications regardless of their location.
• Engineering teams can use RUM tools to see actual user experiences as they interact with your services.
• RUM solutions help identify performance issues and trends that can be resolved before too many users experience them.
• Development teams can use RUM data to verify Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Limitations of RUM

• RUM is unable to tell you about your third-party cloud and SaaS applications if you have no users using them. To understand if one of your 3rd party tools like your Salesforce instance is experiencing problems, you would need one of your users to tell you that they are experiencing a problem.
• Usage from real users varies. This makes it difficult to generate baselines on performance.
• Low usage with services and applications can give you little data to work from.
• RUM solutions require visualization tools to process the large volumes of data created.
• RUM data is not available on new versions of applications, which means DevSecOps teams have to wait until actual deployment to see what issues arise from real users.

SLOs need to be measured and maintained in order to maintain standards of service over a period of time. This can be difficult because there are so many metrics and indicators to track, but because RUM provides comprehensible real-world measurements of all key targets, you have access to valuable data and insights that make maintaining your SLOs and SLAs easy.

Tracking the user journey is another important aspect of application management, and RUM solutions will help contextualize user events by providing you with important attributes like profile IDs, names, email addresses, and other user-related information. You can also learn about how the various interactions within your app, like payments, receipts, and taps, are functioning. You can identify any delays or errors within the journey and start the appropriate resolution steps.

1. Create business objectives.
   Establish overall business goals for RUM. What will the data help you achieve? Having concrete goals will ensure that RUM tools are used for the appropriate reasons and that there is consistent leadership buy-in.
2. Align objectives to technical goals.
   Ensure that business objectives are aligned with the same goals as the engineering and development teams. Technical teams often monitor latency, uptime, etc. As these various metrics are measured, make sure that they roll up to business objectives.
3. Implement RUM across all experiences.
   Modern application users operate on multiple channels. It's common for them to be active on web-based apps, mobile experiences, and more. Where possible, implement your RUM systems to track across all experiences.
4. Always test. Implement your RUM on development and staging environments to test prior to deployment. Make sure that everything works as required prior to any release.

When evaluating RUM vendors, you want to find a solution that includes some of the following features:

• Find solutions that combine RUM and observability into a single platform.
• Ensure your RUM tools integrate with backend data from various monitoring and logging systems.
• Look for tools that have root cause analysis and tracing.
• Your tools should have as complete of a view of user sessions as possible. Avoid tools that sample data.
• Find tools that have replay capabilities to see users' live experiences multiple times.

Sumo Logic ingests data from your applications and services, analyzing and contextualizing insights for application reliability and user experience.

Through Sumo Logic's full-stack observability, you can use a flexible, powerful, and scalable RUM solution to gain even better visibility. Read more about RUM here and Sumo Logic Application Observability.