Real user monitoring (RUM) is one part of the overall application performance management system. In short, it focuses on watching what happens when actual site users interact with your pages. There are some key advantages to employing this approach, but the first order of business is knowing exactly what it entails and then understanding the benefits in detail.
Business owners use a real user monitoring tool by Pingdom to see all the metrics in one place. These tools act as a dashboard for site administrators and developers to view everything that is taking place on a given website. They’ll show key metrics like clicks per page, average load time, time to complete transactions and more.
What Is RUM?
Digital businesses use all kinds of monitoring technologies. Among the most common are programs that collect real-time and real-world data about how users and site visitors behave once they arrive at your main page. The philosophy is based on practicality and relies not on what administrators think someone might do but what that person actually does. It’s close to on the job training because there’s no guessing or conjecture.
One of the best-known types is analytic software that measures hundreds of different metrics based on your page’s visitors and their subsequent behavior. It’s important to remember that all you’re doing is monitoring, at least for the time being. There’s no fixing or adjusting, only observation. Later on, developers and specialized technicians can make all sorts of tweaks and repairs, but for now we’re just watching and collecting data within the RUM task.
How Does It Work?
Technicians collect relevant data like the number of clicks it takes for someone to complete a financial transaction, or the amount of time it takes for a visitor to load blog articles. The process works, in the simplest sense, by aggregating information via an app and sending it to whatever location you use to analyze it. There are masses of numerical and other kinds of data that come out of RUM, and the resulting analysis can be quite complex. One goal of this chore is to make the customer experience better and make it easier for people to navigate your pages.
What Are the Main Advantages?
The two most commonly cited benefits of real-user monitoring are faster, more responsive websites and the ability to solve problems at early stages. It’s possible to set alerts that tell you when a given user is experiencing difficulty with one or another feature. This sort of functionality allows developers and admin techs to respond instantly to situations that impact the user experience in a negative way.
After information is collected, it’s possible to make any website into a much more streamlined, functional version of what it was prior to analysis. The bottom-line benefit of this kind of problem-solving means that business owners end up with an incident-based understanding of what’s causing a less than optimum user experience. Of course, a usable RUM process needs users to help create all the data, but even a small number of site visitors can generate a great deal of worthwhile information for technicians.
