The Best Real User Monitoring Tools

Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives you insight into how actual people are experiencing your application’s performance as they interact with it. Monitoring front-end performance and gaining an understanding of how the user experience is being improved by your optimizations are both possible with the help of RUM tools.

The monitoring strategy reveals whether a specific service can deal with the demand volumes that the site encounters. Additionally, the monitoring strategy reveals whether each service can communicate with other components of a site to guarantee that a normal journey around the website is supported adequately.

Here is our list of the Best Real User Monitoring Tools:

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager EDITOR’S CHOICE Offers both synthetic and real user monitoring across a range of platforms, making it a versatile option for organizations with diverse IT environments. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL) Its cloud-based system provides credits for real user monitoring runs per month, making it a cost-effective option for organizations that want to keep a close eye on their web application performance. Start a 30-day free trial.
3. Datadog Real User Monitoring This one appears to offer a seamless correlation of user journeys with synthetic tests, traces, logs, back-end metrics, and network performance, which can provide comprehensive insights into any issues that may be impacting users.
4. Uptime Its 21-day free trial offers a range of web application checks that include real user monitoring, which could be useful for organizations looking to test the service before committing to a subscription.
5. Sematext Experience An alert-based system provides operators with timely notifications when performance drops below acceptable levels, allowing them to quickly take action and minimize user impact.
6. AppDynamics End User Monitoring Offers walkthrough graphs for sample users and aggregated data, providing a comprehensive view of application performance from the user’s perspective.
7. Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring Lastly, it offers both real user monitoring and synthetic user modeling facilities, which can provide deep insights into user behavior and application performance, making it an ideal choice for organizations that need to monitor complex and diverse IT environments.

The Best Real User Monitoring Tools

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager (FREE TRIAL)

As its name suggests, ManageEngine Applications Manager is a monitor that may be used for a wide variety of applications. The package has a comprehensive inventory of performance-tracking technologies, one of which is the monitoring of web applications. Both synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring features are available through the Applications Manager.

Key Features:

• Track response times per element
• Compare delivery models
• Conduct tests on several sites

The actual user monitoring service keeps track of how the performance of a website or web application varies depending on the location from which the user is requesting the page or application. Additionally, it can determine the impact that content delivery networks and servers located in data centers can have on load times.

Errors in JavaScript, as well as database issues, are recorded by the RUM. You will be able to increase productivity and provide improved experiences for users if you make use of the reports that this tool generates.

Every single statistic that the Applications Manager compiles is subject to having performance expectations attached to it. These requirements take the form of numerical thresholds, and they may have either lower or higher boundaries or both. The Applications Manager will send out an alert whenever one of these performance criteria is surpassed by a new statistic that is being collected.

Because the Applications Manager may be configured to send those warnings to you and your technicians by email, SMS, chat app, or service desk ticketing system, you do not need to sit and watch the dashboard for this monitoring system while you wait for an alert to appear. Instead, you can save yourself some time by not having to do so.

Both Windows Server and Linux can be used to install the Applications Manager. There is no Software as a Service (SaaS) version, but you can operate it on your own cloud account through Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Applications Manager offers a free edition that contains website monitoring, notifications, and root cause analysis. This edition comes with all of these features. The free edition only allows you to monitor up to five different assets. Start a 30-day free trial.

2. Site24x7 (FREE TRIAL)

The Site24x7 Website Monitoring service is a cloud-based solution that offers a wide variety of tools for testing websites in addition to monitoring networks, servers, and applications. If real user monitoring unearths any underlying issues, the combination of services contained in this package makes it possible for analysts to trace back through the application stack until they reach the server and network.

Key Features: 

• Includes infrastructure monitoring
• Generates a tree consisting of pages and elements
• Provides activity reports for each component

To start the monitoring process on a website, the Website Monitoring service will generate a snippet of JavaScript code that must be included in the page’s header before monitoring can be initiated. Once the modification has been sent to production, performance metrics will be viewable in the Site24x7 console.

The RUM keeps track of events that are triggered on the monitored page as a result of user actions and displays these events in real time. In addition to this, it provides a more in-depth analysis of each component of the page, revealing how well it did. These issues can be compiled throughout several pages and perhaps several websites. Because of this, you will be able to see quite clearly if an issue exists in an element that is frequently visited, such as an API or a stylesheet.

Because Site24x7 comes with a performance threshold monitor that notifies you of any potential issues, you won’t have to waste time sitting there and keeping an eye on the console if mistakes occur. This service is powered by an AI assessment function that eliminates the reporting of errors that are incorrectly classified as positive. Notifications can be sent to technicians by text message (SMS), email (email), phone call (voice call), or instant messaging post (IM post).

The Site24x7 Website tracking service is offered as a paid subscription and covers not only synthetic transaction tracking but also uptime tests and response time monitoring. There are four different versions available, including Starter, Pro, Classic, and Enterprise. Start a 30-day free trial.

Site24x7 Website Monitoring Start a 30-day FREE trial

3. Datadog Real User Monitoring

Through its Real User Monitoring service, Datadog monitors load times, error rates, and service dependencies very competently. It then shows performance data on a crowded dashboard that is filled with a variety of graphical representations.

Key Features:

• The dashboard had displays that were packed to the brim with graphs.
• Mapping of dependencies
• Alerts based on performance monitoring

The actual user monitoring service provides performance expectation thresholds in addition to alerts that are triggered whenever certain levels are not met. Therefore, administrators of the website will only need to access the dashboard when they are alerted to the possibility of problems.

Although the crowded data displays of the dashboard can be difficult to process, the fact that there is so much information on each screen means that you do not have to toggle between screens to obtain a comprehensive perspective of how a website is performing. Deep dive screens are less cluttered than regular screens, and they contain capabilities that make it possible to fix frequent failures and determine the underlying reason for delivery issues.

Users can access aggregated data categorized by country, device, browser, operating system, and session type using the analysis panels. This data explorer is interactive and provides options for the data representation as well as the time horizon. Investigation can also be directed toward events and actions.

4. Uptime

Uptime provides Web application testing service packages that contain synthetic monitoring and actual user monitoring tools. These packages can be purchased individually or as a bundle. Each package consists of a collection of prepaid credits that can be applied against a variety of services and can be depleted over the month. This is a subscription-based model of service

Key Features: 

• The application is solely hosted on the web
• Its control panel can be accessed through the use of any conventional web browser.
• It will present real-time information to you in the form of graphs and lists, detailing how well your websites and applications are performing.

Tools for real user monitoring should include a capacity analysis over time, feedback on page and element load speed, and error reporting. You may also use the package to switch between real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring for root cause investigation. This functionality is available to you as part of the package. It is also possible to automate the synthetic monitoring service so that it may provide pre-release inspections as part of a CI/CD workflow.

The Uptime.com service is compatible with a variety of system monitoring applications, such as Datadog and Opsgenie, as well as group communication and project management programs, such as Slack and Pagerduty. The system can be purchased in two different plan levels, each of which comes with a different amount of pre-paid tests to use each month. These two categories are referred to as Essential and Premium.

This synthetic monitoring allows you to launch automatic, customized tests of your websites and Web services. Real user monitoring, on the other hand, provides you with statistics on events that took place during the actual operations of your Web assets on a day-to-day basis.

5. Sematext

At the very top of its dashboard, Sematext Experience includes a tool that can very quickly recognize the user’s current status. The level of a site’s performance for page loads and Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript, JSON, and XML) queries is represented here by two icons in the form of a happy face (or a sad face), depending on how you want to interpret them.

Key Features: 

• A ranking of performance complete with winking faces
• Monitoring of live performances
• A device for conducting historical analyses

The dashboard has an extremely intuitive design, with rapid statistics on the number of users that a site has as well as recent performance displayed as graphs. The view can be easily altered to display the data in a variety of different ways, including by user nation, operating system, browser type, page, or page group. A simple click of a button enables the user to make adjustments to the time segmentation as well.

Because the data may be customized, the same dashboard interface can be used for both live data tracking and historical analysis. Users have the option to view log and event data either as records in a list format or as graphs representing the analysis of those data sources.

Through its alerting mechanism, Sematext provides an excellent support service to the often-overworked administrators of busy websites. Because of this, administrators do not need to monitor the status of their systems because they will be told immediately if something goes wrong. Adjustments can be made to any of the performance levels that initiate alerts.

6. AppDynamics End User Monitoring

AppDynamics End User Monitoring logs system events that occur throughout each user session and compiles these occurrences into comprehensive metrics regarding system performance. Metrics that are considered standard for measuring the user experience are all recorded. These metrics include load times and error rates. Along with these standards, transactions at the code level are logged, which enables website designers to understand exactly which processes impede the presentation of a website and the delivery of the services it provides.

Key Features:

• Determines which third-party APIs are too sluggish to use
• Shows the performance of web page elements
• Compiles statistics on overall consumption

A web developer can determine whether third-party applications hurt the performance of a website by using the AppDynamics system. It is possible, but not guaranteed that none of a website’s performance troubles are the product of the website itself, but rather are the consequence of a badly performing API that is slow to supply. In this scenario, the site designer has the choice of omitting that function entirely, looking for a replacement for that library, or uninstalling that library and hunting for an alternative.

Analysis of each event can be performed in one of two ways: either end-to-end, which tracks the progression of a user via the website; or drill-down, which examines each triggered event and then discovers the services that enable it, proceeding in this manner down to the hardware. Both approaches can be combined. A website designer can determine the underlying reason for load failures or delayed response times by switching between these two displays.

Real User Monitoring Pro and Real User Monitoring Peak are the names of the two different subscription packages that may be purchased for AppDynamics End User Monitoring. Both services are available via subscription, with the Peak plan offering additional tools for customization and analysis.

7. Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring

The Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring service provides users with a session replay capability in addition to a configurable package that includes synthetic modeling and actual user monitoring services. The customer first purchases a block of credits, and then they choose which service they want to utilize those credits for.

Key Features: 

• Records user trips
• It also aggregates activity statistics
• Displays performance metrics

Both a run-through trace of an individual user’s actions on a site and aggregated data that indicates the performance of each component of a site are offered by the Real User Monitoring services of Dynatrace. These functions were developed by Dynatrace. The session recording functionality that the Dynatrace service provides is one of a kind. It provides the ability to replay a session even after it has been finished, allowing the technician to examine the screen as though it were a remote desktop view of a user’s live actions.

A technician can determine exactly which actions led to failures since they have access to both historical data and session run-throughs. These characteristics are also helpful for marketing analysts, who need to determine which services draw the most user activity. They can use these features to do so.

Conclusion

Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools are software solutions that track and monitor the performance of an application from the user’s perspective. Datadog Real User Monitoring is a tool that provides insights into an application’s front-end performance from a real user’s perspective. It correlates user journeys seamlessly with synthetic tests, traces, logs, back-end metrics, and network performance, allowing organizations to identify any issues that may be impacting users.

It offers a range of features, including tracking user behavior, identifying performance bottlenecks, measuring response times, and monitoring page load times. It also provides alerts when performance falls below acceptable levels, allowing organizations to take corrective action quickly. Datadog Real User Monitoring is available as a free trial, and the tool integrates seamlessly with other Datadog products, including Infrastructure Monitoring and APM.