Ensuring user-friendly programs is crucial for the success of any software company. To better understand your users’ experiences and satisfaction, it’s essential to analyze how customers interact with your app or website. Real user monitoring (RUM) solutions allow your company to visualize these interactions, helping you identify what works best for your customers and enabling you to stay ahead of the competition.
RUM offers deeper insights into the user journey by reporting web performance metrics and alerting you when signs of urgent issues are detected. RUM tools can capture entire user sessions to provide context for errors and enhance front-end to backend visibility, aiding in the troubleshooting of intermittent performance issues.
RUM and APM Strategies
Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) are closely related but serve distinct roles in ensuring optimal software performance and user satisfaction. RUM is a crucial component of an effective APM strategy. While APM provides valuable performance data, RUM allows for a deeper understanding of user behavior, offering greater awareness of their front-end digital experience, including any anomalies or mobile application incidents. Optimizing performance and eliminating downtime are key APM goals, and data from end-user experience monitoring helps achieve both. Here is a better understanding of both.
Real User Monitoring (RUM):
• Focus on User Experience: RUM captures real-time data on how actual users interact with an application, providing insights into the user’s journey, behavior, and experience.
• Front-End Monitoring: It primarily monitors the front-end performance, including page load times, user interactions, and the responsiveness of the user interface.
• Error Detection: RUM can identify and provide context for errors encountered by users, such as slow load times, failed page loads, or broken elements on a webpage.
• Session Tracking: By recording entire user sessions, RUM helps understand specific user actions leading to performance issues or errors.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM):
• Comprehensive Performance Data: APM offers a broader scope by monitoring the performance of the application as a whole, from front-end to backend.
• Backend Monitoring: This includes the monitoring of servers, databases, APIs, and other backend components to ensure the application’s overall health.
• Error and Anomaly Detection: APM tools detect performance anomalies, resource usage issues, and errors in the backend, helping to diagnose and resolve problems before they impact users.
• End-to-end Visibility: It provides end-to-end visibility into the application’s performance, helping to correlate backend issues with front-end user experiences.
Best RUM Tools of 2024
RUM tools typically involve adding a small piece of code to web pages or applications, which collects and sends data to a centralized monitoring platform. This data is then analyzed and visualized to provide actionable insights into user behavior and performance. Aren’t these tools truly needed? Here is a list of the best RUM tools:
1. Datadog
Datadog Real User Monitoring provides comprehensive, real-time visibility into individual user activities on your application or website. This RUM tool tracks every aspect of user journeys, including performance over time, pages visited, and resources loaded.
Features:
• Gain an end-to-end view of the user experience for effective issue triage
• Capture critical user actions, such as checkout button clicks
• Collect and correlate actions throughout a user’s session
• Visualize user experience with top lists, time series, and tables
Pricing:
Datadog offers a free version with Core Collection and Visualization features. The Pro version costs $15 per month per host, while the Enterprise version is priced at $23 per month per host.
2. Retrace
Utilizing real user monitoring provides numerous benefits, and Retrace helps you gain a complete understanding of your application’s performance. This tool offers extensive monitoring capabilities, optimizing software performance from the coding level to the network edge.
As a full-cycle APM solution, Retrace enhances your understanding of real users’ overall experiences by correlating client-side traces with logs, errors, and server-side metrics. It delivers an intuitive experience with deep insights into each user interaction, fostering a better environment for user satisfaction. Retrace also accelerates problem-solving and resolves bottlenecks for various application demands.
Features:
• Filter by geography to measure user engagement by location and device
• Compare source maps and stack traces to troubleshoot backend issues affecting end users
• Access individual session performance reports
• Monitor browser page views and page load times
• Track route changes in applications with SPA architecture
Pricing:
Retrace offers a free 14-day trial, with pricing starting at $99 per month thereafter. Discover how you can get started with Retrace RUM today!
3. New Relic
Correct frontend issues before they impact your business with New Relic’s advanced RUM tool. This tool allows you to view features from the user’s perspective, monitoring sessions from the moment a user enters your app or website until they exit.
Features:
• Compatible with Microsoft Azure and AWS
• Supports APM for .NET and Java
• Provides error, log, and monitoring support for .NET, Java, Node, PHP, and Ruby
• Supports .NET Core
• Enhanced profiling for async patterns in Windows Services and other non-web applications
• Data collection capabilities
• User session tracking
• Transaction tracing
• Custom metrics monitoring
• Detailed visit reporting
• Advanced reporting and segmentation
• Robust alerting system
Pricing:
New Relic presents a standard option with fewer features for free. Pricing for the Pro and Enterprise plans is available upon request.
4. Pingdom
Pingdom combines transaction, uptime, and real user monitoring to help you analyze data for specific users and gain deeper insights into regional performance. It monitors millions of pageviews without compromising data integrity.
Features:
• Visualize geographic hot spots with live mapping
• Gain insights into user behaviors
• Utilize advanced filtering for granular visibility
• Easily share user insight reports
• Set performance levels for user experience and measure metrics like Apdex score
• Analyze load time and time to the first byte
Pricing:
Pingdom offers a 30-day free trial. The RUM tool starts at $10 per month.
5. Dynatrace
Dynatrace RUM offers comprehensive, real-time insights into the customer experience. It allows you to analyze user activity across all mobile and web applications on any device and browser, enhancing the overall customer experience. Collect business-relevant metrics to correlate performance issues with their potential impacts on your business.
Features:
• Waterfall analysis provides insights into bytes downloaded, interactive time, network time, and UX time
• View JavaScript error messages, understand the user actions that triggered them, and see the stack traces
• Real-time, AI-based analysis
• Replay individual customer sessions
• Check out the full visibility of customer experience across every digital transaction
Pricing:
Dynatrace offers a 15-day free trial. After the trial:
• Cloud integration starts at $0.10 per cloud automation unit
• Open ingestion starts at $25 per month
• Digital monitoring starts at $11 per month
• Infrastructure monitoring starts at $22 per month
• Full-stack monitoring starts at $74 per month
• Application security starts at $15 per month
6. AppDynamics
AppDynamics monitors visitor journeys and offers insights into their interactions with your website or application. Self-learning algorithms utilize the app’s behavior to generate web metrics with resolution and automatic error detection.
Features:
• Segment session data based on location, device, and other factors
• Experience Journey Map visualizes how users interact with browser-based applications
• Helps reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) with real-time data from user interactions
Pricing:
AppDynamics provides a free 15-day trial that starts at $0.06 per month for 1,000 tokens.
7. Raygun
Raygun’s RUM tool enables you to observe visitor interactions and address performance bottlenecks with straightforward detection and diagnosis. Evaluate real-time data from user sessions and receive recommendations for enhancing the user experience seamlessly.
Features:
• Surface real-user insights
• Language support for JavaScript, Angular, Xamarin, React, iOS, and Android
• Obtain waterfall breakdowns of load times
• Access individual user sessions
• Filter and compare data for enhanced control and granularity
Pricing:
Raygun provides a 14-day free trial and starts at $80 per month.
Final Thoughts
Operating a business online entails various risks. Equipping yourself with a range of tools is essential for ensuring your business flourishes and gains a competitive advantage. Alongside indispensable cybersecurity tools such as vulnerability and penetration testing, real user monitoring offers insights into user satisfaction with your software, providing reassurance in error management and vital metric tracking.
FAQs
What factors should be considered when selecting a RUM tool?
When choosing a RUM tool, organizations should consider factors such as ease of implementation, scalability, data accuracy, real-time monitoring capabilities, integration with existing systems, pricing, and customer support.
Are RUM tools suitable for all types of websites and applications?
Yes, RUM tools can be used for various types of websites and applications, including e-commerce platforms, SaaS products, mobile apps, and more. They are particularly beneficial for organizations looking to enhance digital experiences and drive user engagement.
How do RUM tools ensure data privacy and compliance?
Most RUM tools adhere to strict data privacy regulations and offer features such as anonymization of user data, encryption, and compliance with industry standards like GDPR and CCPA. Organizations should review the privacy policies and features of RUM tools before implementation.
