Why You Should Use Real User Monitoring

It is irritating to spend a long time building an application and then get complaints about its slow loading pages. It is more annoying as you do not know where the problem lies. And if it is ignored, the problems affect experience of end users and ultimately your bottom line.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) helps to prevent these problems. Using a small piece of code it is possible to collect information of the end users from their own browsers. Analyzing such data you will be able to find out reasons behind slow loading time or other performance problems.

How RUM is Different From Synthetic Testing?Synthetic testing or monitoring is often used by the website owners to monitor uptime or predict performance of users. However, synthetic testing is not comprehensive as it only shows results of what you asked from it. It fails to decipher the complex behavior of users and how they navigate through a website. RUM, on the other hand, takes into consideration only the user experience. It helps you to understand how your web-based app is going to perform for the end users.

Synthetic monitoring shows what could happen to your site, whereas RUM let you know what is happening.

What are The Basic Steps Followed for RUM?RUM analyzes user interaction on the mobile, cloud, or web- based applications. Based on that it produces a report that helps to identify and fix users’ issues and infrastructural problems. With this process you can monitor which pages the customers visited, see when and where the pages malfunctioned and examine response times.

The basic procedures followed by RUM are:• Capturing data• Sessionization• Detecting problems• Reporting and segmentation• Alerting

What are The Benefits of RUM?From the discussion so far, it is evident that RUM examines the experience every time someone lands on your site. The experience can be divided into two parts. The first part involves whether people can use your website and how well the site has worked for them. The second part is about ways of delivering better user experience. You need to track site performance and functionalities and make an effort to deliver something better.

Easily Identify ProblemsRUM let you quickly detect a problem that a customer encounters. When a customer reports any problem, you can see what has happened. Even RUM acts as an audit tool to know what is going wrong. RUM can even be fed into alert policies. You will be alerted whenever there is an issue and you can start troubleshooting to fix the problem immediately.

Gaining Deeper InsightsRUM lets you analyze requests across a certain browser, region or URL. You can track them over time to detect abnormalities. You can also use the data gathered from RUM to review performance and infrastructure. It will help you to understand the reasons behind slow speed, bounce rates and conversions.

Avoid Costly IssuesAs RUM detects the minor issues, it prevents everyday problems from becoming costly. It helps you to avoid problems in the first place. If there is an issue you can detect and resolve it faster.

It is strongly recommended to make use of the benefits offered by RUM. As you can gain better insight of consumers and serve them in the best possible way.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.