Real User Monitoring benefits: The real value to your team

This article was last updated August 2019

People often ask about the impact they should see when they implement our Real User Monitoring (RUM)tool.

In our experience, customers experience benefits like increased developer productivity, a lower cost to acquire users and better customer service. If you are wondering whether to invest in a Real User Monitoring tool, this should serve as a guide to what impact you should see.

Full visibility into software performance

Only 1% of users report performance problems. Real User Monitoring allows you to experience your apps the way your users do, so there’s no need for them to report issues for you to know what’s going on. Even simple JavaScript errors can cause a website significant problems, especially on pages with earning potential.

With RUM, if there’s a slow loading page, you’ll be the first to know about it, not your customer.

Developer productivity

In our experience, engineers spend a lot of time searching for performance problems. Engineers are expensive, and they need to spend their time creating the products that customers love, not manually crawling your web properties for issues.

Raygun, for example, will periodically crawl your app for performance problems, so your team doesn’t have to. One example of how it does this is with Insights which passes each page through a set of 22 rules, then delivers precisely which pages passed, which failed, and why.

With Insights, there’s no need for a developer to open a code editor to know there’s a problem.

Raygun passes each page through a set of 22 rules, surfacing which passed and which failed.

Track high-value pages

Prioritizing fixes is a lead engineer’s responsibility, but how do you know which problems to focus on first? Real User Monitoring allows you to monitor and discover problems on high-value pages, like a payment or signup page for example. Use the high-level charts presented on dashboards for a quick health- check of your apps.

Reduce cost to acquire customers

Most companies spend significant amounts of money on marketing efforts. But if the pages you send people to take over three seconds to load, they will just leave, wasting your marketing spend.

Real User Monitoring helps you detect these problems and fix them before they affect any more users.

Confidence in new version releases

With version usage information, see how users are adopting new features so you can make data-driven decisions about version support.

Raygun’s Version Usage page. Watch for an upward trend as more users adopt each version

Customizable data visualization

We know that performance monitoring looks different to different team members. High-level charts don’t help developers when getting to the bottom of the problem, and code snippets don’t help technical leads see trends over time. RUM tools can visualize different levels of data based on your preference, serving it in customizable dashboards for the whole team to see.

Improve customer service

It’s all about making your web and mobile experiences great for your users. RUM allows you to deal with problems much faster, most times before a user reports an issue. When a user does report a slow loading page, they will be delighted when you can get back to them saying the problem is fixed.

Many more benefits

Our customers are always using Real User Monitoring in innovative ways to solve business problems. You can read more about them on our customer stories pages.

Some Real User Monitoring tools collect vast amounts of data but don’t present it in an actionable way that the whole team can use. Raygun’s Real User Monitoring focuses on great UI and easy to understand data for developers and technical leads alike.