Both RUM and synthetic monitoring are crucial to effective application performance monitoring (APM). Businesses often use these techniques together to obtain meaningful results. However, they often struggle to spot the differences when it comes to synthetic monitoring vs real user monitoring. Let’s explore them in detail.
RUM is a type of passive web monitoring. It relies on technology to track and analyze the website or application performance in the background, including the availability, usability, and responsiveness. This approach also requires a decent amount of traffic or page views before surfacing significant results related to web application performance in the real world or client environment with varying browsers, devices, networks, and geolocations. Understanding the long-term performance trends is more straightforward with RUM by analyzing the current and past application usage patterns.
Synthetic monitoring, in contrast, takes a proactive approach to website monitoring by running automated scripts simulating real user activities to track and eliminate short-term performance issues during application development. Additionally, synthetic monitoring enables QA teams to test an application before its release. It’s handy for high-traffic websites where early testing can help retain users and minimize revenue losses due to application errors. However, simulating every real-world scenario is practically impossible due to various environmental factors, such as the user’s device, network speed, and geolocation. RUM can help fill this gap by offering more visibility into actual user experiences.
4. Benefits of RUM
Some important benefits of RUM include:
- Improved customer experience: RUM solutions gather real-time transaction data helpful in understanding the actual behavior of web visitors. It can help you identify how and where your users access your site without sampling your data and understand who is affected by outages or poor user experiences.
- Enhanced visibility: RUM investigates a website from the customers’ perspective to detect and report unexpected issues, such as page load performance across different geographies, browser types, and more. Having such granular visibility into app performance can help eradicate hard-to-detect problems quickly before they reach end users and, as a result, bring down your revenue.
- Higher productivity: Manual detection of website performance and usability issues is often time- and resource-intensive. RUM tools can automatically detect website performance problems, allowing developers to fix them rapidly without additional effort.
5. Empowering Insights with Cavisson
Cavisson offers a robust RUM solution designed to provide businesses with actionable insights into their digital properties. Leveraging advanced monitoring capabilities, Cavisson enables organizations to:
❖ Monitor Performance in Real-Time:
With Cavisson RUM, businesses can monitor key performance metrics, such as page load times, server response times, and transaction durations, in real-time. By gaining visibility into performance issues as they occur, organizations can proactively address bottlenecks and ensure optimal user experiences.