Product update: Raygun Real User Monitoring performance boost

Good news from the Raygun skunk works – Raygun Real User Monitoring performance has just received a major boost!

Last week, we rolled out a rebuilt backend to all customers and trial users, and the metrics show a big improvement over the previous implementation. This is effective immediately, and if you have the Raygun RUM product as a part of your Raygun plan, you can log in now and see the benefits.

The previous behavior

When we released Raygun Real User Monitoring (RUM) last year, we saw uptake from some pretty big names. End user’s browsers can generate a lot of view event and timing data when using our customer’s websites and applications, and ingesting this data and making it available for querying required significant effort. Over time we saw the data volumes increase, and the need for a highly tuned persistence layer became apparent. We’ve been working on this over the past couple of months, and pleasingly the release to production of this has been successful.

Raygun RUM is now responding with ~1s query times for uncached data (the time it takes until the component loading spinners disappear). With the prior implementation, when many people first integrate RUM into their website the UI was fairly responsive, but query times started to degrade linearly as the data stored increased. The new backend essentially removes this linear degradation, resulting in the aforementioned ~1s query times. This meets our desired performance levels for real-time analytics and should make it more pleasant and possible to explore and answer business and technical questions using Real User Monitoring.

Areas with major wins

The majority of the benefit is shown by the component load times in Performance, Users, Browsers, Platforms and Geo, and their drilled-in views.

The ‘Live’ tab uses Redis for recent, transient data and thus always loaded pretty quickly. The other main area of Real User Monitoring is the ‘Sessions’ views, which are loaded from a different persistence layer and thus won’t have as great a boost by the upgrades. We’re seeing pretty good median load times for the Sessions components, the location of which you can see below:

We’re are always continuing research and improving the product so these views will likely get improvements in the near future to ensure they load even faster.

We’d love to hear your feedback

At Raygun we’re customer focused and find the opinions of the people who use our products to be the most important. As such, we’re always looking for more stories, use cases and what you need from RUM so we can build an even greater experience. Are you a front-end developer using it to monitor client-side performance hotspots? Are you a team lead or product manager, looking for a holistic view of entire sites/apps? Are you involved in marketing and need great data on real users and their behavior as they visit your public site? We have some great ideas about how RUM can be enhanced, and we want to take your views into account when developing the product.

The new backend and the speed it brings allows all sorts of exciting UIs, UXs and use cases, so send your feedback through and we’ll get to work.

Related articles:

How Raygun used Real User Monitoring Insights to improve page load times by 38%

How Raygun Real User Monitoring differs from Google Analytics