Beyond the Lab: Why Real User Monitoring Matters

Slow applications frustrate users and impact your bottom line. Optimising their performance and reliability isn’t always straightforward. To understand the root cause and to optimize changes, it’s important to focus on the actual user experience. 

That’s where Real User Monitoring (RUM) shines: offering a data-driven approach to enhance user experience. RUM helps you understand how users experience your site based on their device, region, internet connection, and behaviour patterns. This enables you to prioritize improvements with confidence and measure their effectiveness precisely. In this blog, we’ll explore what real user monitoring is, why you should consider using it, and how we at CloudFuel implement it for our clients. Let’s have a look. 

What is Real User Monitoring (RUM)? 

Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures the actual experiences of real users interacting with your applications and websites. Unlike synthetic monitoring, which simulates user behaviour in a controlled environment, RUM gives you the unfiltered truth about how your applications perform in the wild. RUM is an essential part of application performance monitoring (APM), user experience monitoring, and website monitoring. We’ll get into other important parts of APM in later blog posts. 

Basically, Real User Monitoring tells you what’s really happening when actual users engage with your systems. That includes their diverse devices, network conditions, and unpredictable behaviours. Since it’s difficult to simulate all these variables in a controlled environment, rel-user data is a great source of information that you’d miss otherwise. 

Why should you consider using RUM? 

Well, it’s not just another monitoring tool to add to your ever-growing tech stack but a strategic asset. It gives you a real-world view of how your applications perform in the hands of the people who matter most. 

Here are four reasons why we think RUM deserves a serious look: 

1. Enhanced user experience
   RUM helps you pinpoint frustrating bottlenecks like slow loading times, unresponsive interfaces, and error messages. Happier users mean higher engagement, better retention, and ultimately, a more successful product. 
2. Boosting revenue
   Related to our previous point: a smooth, seamless user experience is good for business. RUM can lead to higher conversion rates, increased sales, and yes, more revenue. By removing performance roadblocks, you clear the path for users to engage with your product. 
3. Optimising development resources
   RUM gives your developers the insights they need to troubleshoot and resolve performance issues quickly and efficiently. That means less time spent on hunting down elusive bugs and more time on building valuable features. 
4. Data-driven decisions
   By understanding how users actually interact with your applications – which features they use, where they get stuck, and when they abandon ship – you can make informed decisions about product development, feature prioritisation, and resource allocation. 

What can you track with our RUM solution? 

Like (almost) anything in IT, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to application performance monitoring (APM). That’s why we take a custom approach to RUM. Instead of having to dig your way through dozens of dashboards and see what fits, you get one or more overviews that are built to your specifications. 

To make things more concrete, here’s what you can currently track and analyse with our RUM offering. Of course, feel free to ask us about any other features you’d like to include. 

• Device and network variability: see how performance varies across different devices, browsers, operating systems, and network speeds. 
• Regional performance insights: understand how users in different geographic locations experience your applications. 
• Custom user journeys: track actual user navigation paths within your application or website. 
• Holistic performance metrics: gain detailed insights into page load times, interactivity, responsiveness (INP), and visual stability (CLS). 
• SEO and performance optimisation: track and improve your core web vitals like LCP, INP, and CLS. 
• Proactive issue detection: identify performance degradation and regional outages early on. 
• Impact analysis: understand how many users are affected by specific problems. 
• Continuous improvement: track the impact of performance changes and monitor trends. 

Which technologies do our monitoring solutions use? 

We combined the power of open-source standards with robust cloud platforms to create a APM solution that’s both effective and budget-friendly. Here’s a glimpse under the hood. 

We start with OpenTelemetry, an open-source standard for collecting and structuring telemetry data. This gives you the flexibility to easily change where and how your data is stored without having to alter your instrumentation. This abstraction allows you to visualize and analyze your telemetry data with a variety of tools, such as Application Insights and Grafana, without having to rewrite the way you collect it. 

All that valuable telemetry data flows into Azure Monitor, a robust and scalable cloud platform perfectly suited for analysing vast amounts of data. Think of it as the central nervous system of your APM solution that processes and organises all the incoming information so it’s ready to be visualised. 

Finally, we use Grafana to create beautiful, insightful dashboards that you’ll actually want to look at. It allows us to customise dashboards to your needs and present the data in a way that’s clear, concise, and actionable. No more sifting through mountains of irrelevant signals: you get the information you need, when you need it. 

This combination of OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, and Grafana gives you enterprise-grade monitoring capabilities without the enterprise-level price tag. While we can’t include everything in this blog, we’re happy to discuss the technical details further and answer any questions you might have. 

What if I don’t have the time to manage my RUM tool? 

Maintaining a RUM solution can be complex. That’s why we offer managed services to monitor and analyse all alerts from your APM solution, freeing you to focus on other priorities. We work with you to resolve issues quickly, establishing clear escalation paths and response times with your partners. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we can help. 

Conclusion 

Real User Monitoring gives you the insights you need to get an edge over your competition, but implementing it effectively requires expertise. Our custom monitoring solutions let you unlock RUM’s full potential without breaking the bank, either with a self-managed approach or the peace of mind of our fully managed services. 

Ready to stop guessing and start knowing how your users experience your applications? Contact us today to discuss your needs and see how CloudFuel can help you achieve your performance goals.