For an application engineer encountering a critical user-experience bug happening on a web browser or a mobile app, a Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool is often a key plank of the resolution process. By collecting telemetry about the application from the perspective of the end user, RUM helps the engineer understand the major steps of the user journey before the issue occurred, especially for front-end specific issues (JavaScript Errors, image size, etc.) But, in many cases, their ability to diagnose the problem is limited for issues at the interface between frontend and backend, because information about the root cause of the issue resides in a separate Application Performance Monitoring (APM) product.
The steps needed to find that information — toggling between different products, trying to identify the relevant team, asking for further information from that team — add up. The time it takes to connect information from the RUM and APM respective telemetry is time that prolongs degraded customer experiences, unfixed errors, and lost revenue. There’s a better way to handle these kinds of incidents, but it requires truly connecting the data from APM and RUM, and breaking silos between the teams who use them.
Real User Monitoring Provides Insight Into the User’s Experience
RUM grants teams real-time insight into how users are experiencing any Browser or Mobile applications. This is incredibly valuable, especially to engineers working on the client-side, who need to know if aspects of the customer’s experience aren’t working as intended — including key details like how long the user waited for a page to load, the user’s location, device type, browser, OS, application version, URL, and the details about errors and crashes. RUM goes beyond the collection and processing of this data — it also provides a dedicated UI to ensure this data is easily accessible and explicit enough to guide explorations. This powerful tool is limited, however, to the data that can be collected on
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