Challenges in real user monitoring (RUM)

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a crucial aspect of web performance monitoring that involves tracking and analyzing user interactions with a website or web application. It provides valuable insights into the actual user experience and helps businesses identify and address issues that may be affecting their website’s performance. However, like any other monitoring process, RUM also comes with its own set of challenges.

In this article, we will discuss some of the major challenges in real user monitoring and how businesses can overcome them.

1. Managing high data volume and scalability

With the increasing complexity of websites and web applications, the amount of data generated by RUM tools has also increased significantly. RUM captures data from every user interaction across your site or app. This results in a massive volume of data that can be overwhelming for businesses to store, process, and analyze, especially for large-scale applications. Moreover, not all data collected by RUM tools is relevant or useful, making it even more challenging to extract meaningful insights.

Solution: Having a clear understanding of the objectives for businesses to use RUM, along with the focus on collecting and analyzing only the data relevant to the specific needs, can be a good start. Implement efficient data processing pipelines and aggregation techniques to reduce data volume without losing critical insights. Use sampling methods to collect representative data instead of tracking every single session, balancing between data completeness and manageability.

2. Ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance

Since RUM collects sensitive user data such as IP addresses, device information, and location, it raises privacy and compliance issues with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others if mishandled. In addition, users may not be comfortable with their data being tracked and shared with businesses, especially if it is not done transparently. This can lead to a negative perception of the business and may even result in legal issues.

Solution: Transparency in data collection practices, implementing clear user consent mechanisms, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations will help businesses to completely avoid this issue. They should aid in anonymizing user data and removing personally identifiable information (PII) before storage or processing. Balance data collection needs with privacy by limiting data granularity and obtaining user consent when necessary as well as provide users with the option to opt-out of data tracking if they wish to do so.

3. Lack of server-side and backend visibility

While RUM excels at capturing frontend user experience, it does not provide insights into backend or server-side issues, which can also affect performance and user satisfaction. RUM tools may not be able to capture data from the server-side, making it difficult to identify and troubleshoot issues that may be affecting website performance.

Solution: Businesses can use a combination of RUM and server-side/backend monitoring tools such as application performance monitoring (APM), log analysis, and infrastructure monitoring to get a full-stack view of performance. Using full-stack monitoring solutions like Applications Manager that integrate frontend RUM data with backend metrics to correlate user experience can help provide them with both client-side and server-side data, allowing them to identify and address issues more effectively.

4. Dealing with device and browser fragmentation

Users access websites using countless combinations of devices, operating systems, and browsers. Ensuring consistent tracking across this fragmented environment is complex. In addition, users often switch between desktop, mobile, and apps, making it hard to correlate sessions and get a holistic view of the user journey.

Solution: Combining RUM with synthetic monitoring can pave the way in covering the monitoring gaps and help to maintain baseline performance metrics. Continuously test your monitoring scripts across multiple device/browser configurations. Track key cross-platform actions such as logins or account changes as anchor points. Use persistent, anonymized user identifiers that span across sessions and devices (while respecting privacy rules).

5. Inability to capture all user interactions

Real user monitoring tools rely on JavaScript to collect data from end-users’ devices. However, this can be a challenge as some users may disable JavaScript or cookies, which are often required for RUM scripts to function, leading to incomplete data collection and incorrect conclusions. Also, RUM itself can sometimes slow down page performance if the monitoring scripts are too heavy or intrusive, further increasing the monitoring discrepancy.

Solution: To mitigate this challenge, businesses should regularly test their RUM tools to ensure they are functioning correctly. They can also use alternative methods, such as synthetic monitoring, to supplement RUM data and get a more accurate picture of their website’s performance. In addition, they should educate users on the benefits of enabling these features or provide fallback mechanisms for basic monitoring. In the case of script performance overhead, use lightweight, asynchronous RUM scripts that do not block page rendering.

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