Real User Monitoring (RUM) Best Tools, Best Practices & Implementation
By
Liz Fujiwara
•
Nov 11, 2025
Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures real-time user interactions on websites and applications to provide actionable insights into performance and user experience. By observing how users engage with your digital platforms, businesses can pinpoint bottlenecks, identify usability issues, and ensure that every interaction runs smoothly.
Unlike synthetic monitoring, which relies on simulated traffic, RUM reflects actual user behavior across devices, locations, and network conditions. This data helps teams understand real-world performance, prioritize optimizations, and deliver a seamless digital experience.
In this article, we’ll break down how RUM works, discuss key performance metrics, highlight top RUM tools, and share practical implementation tips to help you enhance visibility, improve site performance, and increase user satisfaction.
Key Takeaways
Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures actual user interactions to provide essential insights into performance metrics and user experiences, supporting digital experience optimization.
Effective RUM implementation involves inserting JavaScript code for data collection, monitoring key performance metrics such as load times and user engagement, and managing data volume through effective visualization tools.
RUM offers significant advantages, including improved user satisfaction through real-time issue identification, support for data-driven decisions, and the ability to enhance application performance by understanding user behaviors.
What is Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures actual user interactions to provide insights into performance metrics and user experience. The primary purpose of RUM is to understand and optimize user experience on digital platforms. Optimizing user experiences in today’s digital world depends on understanding user interactions through RUM.
RUM provides visibility into user journeys for web and mobile applications by:
Measuring metrics such as page load times, errors, and user engagement
Tracking browser events that impact users
Providing essential performance data to help businesses identify and resolve issues quickly
Real User Monitoring examines users’ real-time behaviors and actions while analyzing interactions and trends as they navigate websites and applications. Incorporating actual user experience and real-time monitoring enhances understanding of user behavior.
Capturing a comprehensive view of user sessions is necessary to avoid blind spots in the user experience. RUM identifies key issues that affect user satisfaction and provides insights essential for digital experience optimization. End-to-end visibility into user journeys involves tracking every step a user takes to ensure a seamless digital experience. RUM tools are primarily designed to help organizations understand user experiences across various industries.
How Real User Monitoring Works
The implementation of Real User Monitoring (RUM) typically involves:
Inserting a JavaScript code snippet into a website or application to collect user interaction data
Using this snippet to capture performance data directly from users’ browsers or devices
Enabling detailed analysis of how actual users interact with the application
RUM collects metrics by embedding code into applications to monitor user interactions. Understanding how RUM functions begins with the data capture process and the key performance metrics it tracks. The following subsections provide a deeper look into these components, offering a clear picture of how RUM operates to deliver valuable insights.
Data Capture Process
Integrating Real User Monitoring requires adding a lightweight script to the application’s codebase. For browser-based applications, this involves:
Injecting JavaScript code to enable monitoring and capture JavaScript errors
Collecting information during user navigation, including page load times and interactions
Sending the collected data to a data store for querying and visualization
For native mobile applications, monitoring is achieved by incorporating a specific monitoring library into the application package. The processed data provides insights into user experiences, performance bottlenecks, and errors. This comprehensive data capture process ensures that businesses have a clear view of how users interact with their digital platforms, allowing them to make informed decisions for performance optimization.
Key Performance Metrics
RUM is a crucial component of application performance monitoring, offering insights into key metrics such as page performance, load times, and user engagement. RUM tracks essential metrics like load time, user actions, and error rates, which are critical for understanding the overall user experience. These measurements help identify performance issues and engagement trends, enabling teams to troubleshoot and optimize applications effectively.
Additionally, RUM gathers data on user behaviors, capturing metrics such as clicks, navigation patterns, and Core Web Vitals to assess application performance. The browser monitoring script in RUM collects user interaction data from the user’s browser, including logs, metrics, traces, and events for detailed analysis.
Comprehensive data analysis from RUM provides valuable insights into error detection and tracking, which are essential for maintaining application reliability and ensuring a seamless user experience.
Benefits of Real User Monitoring
Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides several benefits:
Offers insights into actual user experiences, leading to improved user satisfaction
Enhances performance optimization by identifying performance issues and providing real-world insights
Enables teams to detect performance issues early, facilitating faster issue resolution
By supporting data-driven decisions, RUM helps achieve better business outcomes and enhances overall user satisfaction and engagement. These benefits can be categorized into two main areas: improving user experience and supporting data-driven decisions.
Enhancing User Experience
RUM enables businesses to monitor how real users experience their applications and identify performance issues that may impact satisfaction. Real-time visibility into user interactions helps organizations understand user behaviors and optimize workflows by pinpointing pain points. Leading RUM tools leverage a variety of metrics to improve user experience and overall application performance.
For instance, Datadog’s RUM provides advanced visualization capabilities and geo-performance insights for large organizations based on geographic location. By tracking client-side performance metrics, RUM effectively evaluates user experience, helping businesses optimize their websites and applications to strengthen customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Addressing issues before they affect customers can significantly increase user satisfaction and engagement. This proactive approach ensures that businesses maintain a superior user experience, ultimately driving better business outcomes and supporting critical user actions.
Supporting Data-Driven Decisions
RUM helps development teams understand how aspects of application performance, such as latency, impact customer experience. It generates valuable data about user behavior and platform performance, enabling teams to make informed decisions. This approach allows businesses to proactively optimize performance by identifying trends and potential issues early.
Key insights from RUM include metrics related to user actions and application functionalities that drive performance improvements. Effective data reporting and visualization in RUM make it easier to gain insights, understand user behavior, and identify performance bottlenecks quickly.
Regular reviews of RUM data should be scheduled to stay up to date on performance metrics and ensure continuous improvement.
Differences Between Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring
Real User Monitoring (RUM) uses real user data, while synthetic monitoring relies on simulated users. Both types of user experience monitoring are essential for providing comprehensive insights into digital performance. RUM delivers data-driven insights that help meet service level agreements, while synthetic monitoring enables proactive testing and simulation of expected user experiences.
However, synthetic monitoring can face limitations in unpredictability, as it operates within a controlled environment and may miss real-world user scenarios. Conversely, RUM can generate a large volume of data, which can make identifying and addressing specific user issues more complex.
Using RUM alongside synthetic monitoring offers a complete perspective on digital experience monitoring. This combined strategy enhances understanding and analysis, ensuring that businesses can proactively test and optimize their platforms while also gaining visibility into how real users interact with their applications.
Challenges and Limitations of Real User Monitoring
RUM’s ability to observe user experience is limited by several factors:
The sheer volume of data generated, which can be overwhelming
The costs associated with managing large data volumes
The complexity of identifying crucial insights within vast datasets
The frequent use of data sampling in RUM implementations, which can reduce the comprehensiveness of performance insights
The effectiveness of RUM is also impacted when users experiencing issues do not successfully transfer data. Real User Monitoring often struggles to provide detailed insights into every user session due to practical limitations. While RUM effectively highlights trends, it may not always deliver actionable insights for individual user issues.
Best Practices for Implementing Real User Monitoring
Implementing Real User Monitoring requires thoughtful planning and execution. Setting clear objectives for RUM implementation aligns monitoring efforts with strategic goals. Integrating RUM into test environments helps identify performance issues before deployment, ensuring smoother transitions into production.
Choosing RUM solutions that include:
Transaction tracing
Log management
Establish Clear Business Objectives
Defining business objectives for RUM ensures alignment with strategic priorities and guides data collection efforts. Establishing clear goals helps ensure that Real User Monitoring efforts support broader organizational strategies.
To guide the RUM strategy effectively, objectives should connect business outcomes to technical goals. This alignment ensures that technical efforts contribute to measurable improvements in user experience and overall business success.
Integrate RUM in Test Environments
Integrating RUM during testing can uncover performance issues before they affect users in production. This proactive approach identifies and resolves potential problems early, leading to smoother transitions to production environments and improved overall user experience through automated testing.
Opt for Comprehensive RUM Solutions
Choosing a comprehensive RUM solution is essential for achieving full visibility across all performance aspects. Select a holistic platform that includes transaction tracing, log management, and infrastructure monitoring. A complete RUM tool should also offer session replay features to visualize user interactions.
RUM providers typically include alerting, profiling, and log management capabilities for deeper insights. These features help businesses maintain a complete view of user interactions, leading to better performance optimization and an improved user experience.
Top Real User Monitoring Tools
Several excellent tools and vendors are available for Real User Monitoring (RUM). Careful consideration of various factors is essential when selecting a RUM tool.
New Relic
New Relic is a cloud-based observability platform for real-time monitoring. Its comprehensive features make it a powerful RUM solution, offering valuable insights into application performance and user interactions.
Datadog
Datadog’s Real User Monitoring provides visibility into user journeys and experiences in real time. Its real-time insights into application performance help teams quickly detect issues and make informed optimization decisions.
eG Innovations
eG Innovations’ RUM tools offer the following benefits:
Enable businesses to analyze user experiences without deploying agents on web applications
Use an agentless approach that simplifies monitoring setup
Optimize user experiences
Provide root cause analysis to help identify issues affecting performance and user satisfaction
These tools are designed to enhance user experiences by providing real-time insights and website performance data through web-based applications. This comprehensive approach ensures that businesses maintain high levels of engagement, satisfaction, and retention while users interact with their platforms.
How Fonzi Enhances AI Hiring
Fonzi operates a specialized recruitment platform that connects businesses with pre-vetted AI engineers through structured hiring events known as Match Day. Unlike traditional job boards or black-box AI tools, Fonzi delivers high-signal, structured evaluations with built-in fraud detection and bias auditing, making the hiring process fast, consistent, and scalable.
Unique Approach of Fonzi
Fonzi uses structured evaluations and Match Day events to connect companies with top-tier AI engineers, creating a high-signal evaluation process to ensure quality talent acquisition. This approach includes bias auditing and fraud detection techniques to enhance the integrity and fairness of the hiring process.
The structured evaluations and focus on transparency result in a scalable hiring process that accommodates both startups and large enterprises efficiently. By maintaining high standards and visibility, Fonzi enables businesses to confidently hire the best AI talent available.
Benefits for Startups and Enterprises
Fonzi supports organizations of all sizes, providing tailored resources for both startups making initial hires and large enterprises scaling their AI teams. By streamlining the hiring process, Fonzi enables rapid team growth with access to top-tier talent.
The platform uses rigorous evaluations and fraud detection mechanisms to ensure high-quality candidate matches while addressing potential biases in the hiring process. This comprehensive approach helps businesses achieve better outcomes by hiring the right talent efficiently and effectively.
Summary
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is an essential tool for understanding and optimizing user experience on digital platforms. By capturing actual user interactions and performance metrics, RUM provides valuable insights that help businesses enhance satisfaction, support data-driven decisions, and improve overall performance. Implementing RUM requires thoughtful planning, including setting clear business objectives, integrating RUM into test environments, and selecting comprehensive monitoring solutions.
Using the right RUM tools, such as New Relic, Datadog, and eG Innovations, can significantly improve your ability to monitor and optimize user experiences. Additionally, platforms like Fonzi help businesses efficiently hire top-tier AI talent, ensuring they have the expertise to leverage RUM and other advanced technologies. By following best practices and choosing the right tools, organizations can achieve superior user experiences and stronger business outcomes.
