Best practices in real user monitoring (RUM)

In an era where digital experience defines brand reputation, Real User Monitoring (RUM) has become an indispensable part of any website or application performance monitoring strategy. RUM helps teams observe how real users interact with websites and applications in production, giving unmatched visibility into performance bottlenecks and usability issues. RUM helps businesses identify and address performance issues, improve user satisfaction, and ultimately drive business growth.

But collecting data alone isn’t enough. To make the most of RUM, organizations must follow strategic best practices. In this article, we explore actionable recommendations to maximize the value of RUM and ensure your digital platforms delight users.

1. Define clear objectives and align technical goals

Start by establishing specific, quantifiable business objectives for your RUM efforts, such as reducing page load times, lowering bounce rates, or increasing conversion rates. These goals directly shape which metrics you should prioritize and how you interpret your data. Equally important is linking these business goals to technical metrics—for example, connecting a goal to reduce bounce rates with optimizing critical rendering paths or resource loading times. This alignment ensures that technical improvements directly support business success.

2. Choose the right metrics

RUM platforms can capture hundreds of data points, but not every metric is equally valuable. Focus on those that that are most important to your business and directly impact the user experience. Some common KPIs in RUM include page load time, time to first byte, error rates, and server response time. By prioritizing meaningful metrics, you can focus on monitoring and improving the areas that have the most significant impact on user experience.

3. Prioritize key user journeys

Identify and focus on critical user journeys within your application or website, such as registration, product search, or checkout processes. Concentrating RUM efforts on these paths helps monitor the most impactful user interactions and optimize the areas that matter most to user satisfaction and business outcomes.

4. Measure performance across platforms

It is crucial to monitor the performance of your website or application across different devices and browsers to ensure a consistent user experience. By doing so, you can identify any performance issues that may be specific to a particular device or browser and take steps to optimize performance for all users. RUM should cover both web-based and mobile applications, as performance characteristics can vary widely between platforms. Furthermore, segmenting your data based on platforms can help you provide clear insights as well as uncover hidden performance problems that are specific to platforms. For instance, someone browsing on a mid-tier Android device in a region with limited bandwidth might experience a drastically slower site than someone on a high-end iPhone over broadband.

5. Monitor real user interactions end-to-end

It’s equally important to shift from merely analyzing individual pages to observing entire user journeys. Users rarely engage with a single page; they move through multiple steps before converting or leaving. Monitoring these end-to-end journeys helps pinpoint where drop-offs happen and reveals performance issues that might not be obvious from page-level metrics alone. Combining RUM with synthetic monitoring provides a proactive layer as synthetic tests run scripted user flows from controlled environments and can catch problems before they reach end users, while RUM provides the reality check of live user experience.

6. Integrate RUM with essential platforms

Incorporate RUM into your DevOps pipelines to ensure that monitoring code is properly injected and maintained. Also, integrate RUM data with other observability tools such as logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing to enables a full-stack view of performance issues, helping to quickly identify root causes and accelerate resolution. Furthermore, integrating RUM into incident management platforms transforms monitoring into action whenever thresholds are breached, so that alerts can flow directly into tools like ServiceDesk Plus, ServiceNow, Slack or PagerDuty in real time.

7. Set baselines and SLAs

Establishing clear baselines and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is another critical step as they help estimate the expected or desired performance of your website or application. By setting baseline metrics, you can compare the actual performance with the expected performance and identify any deviations. Using historical RUM data, organizations can set performance benchmarks—like ensuring LCP stays under 2.5 seconds for most users—and track improvements over time. These benchmarks help translate technical metrics into measurable business outcomes and keep teams aligned on what “good” performance looks like.

8. Act on RUM insights

Collecting data is only valuable if you take action based on insights. Use RUM findings to guide performance optimizations, UX improvements, and faster issue resolution. Sharing actionable data and tailored dashboards with product managers, designers, and business teams helps everyone understand how performance affects user experience and conversions, making performance a shared responsibility across the organization.

9. Continuously reassess and optimize

Real user monitoring is not a one-time activity; it is an ongoing process. It is essential to continuously monitor and optimize performance to ensure a consistent and positive user experience. Regularly revisiting what you monitor, adjusting baselines, and exploring new segments keeps your RUM strategy relevant and effective. By doing so, organizations move beyond passively measuring performance to actively shaping and improving it. By regularly monitoring performance, you can identify any new issues that may arise and take immediate action to resolve them. This can help you maintain a high level of performance and user satisfaction.

Devise your RUM strategy with Applications Manager!

Embark on your quest to boost your website and web application's performance by implementing the above best practices we have discussed for real user monitoring. With the aid of Applications Manager, you can attain full real-time visibility into their operations within your infrastructure. Our tool not only offers robust real user monitoring capabilities, but also provides valuable insights into application performance, infrastructure health, and cloud app functionality. Effectively identify and resolve issues, streamline tasks through automation, and guarantee uninterrupted user satisfaction. Book a personalized demo or make the most of our complimentary 30-day free trial to fully experience the vast potential of our RUM solution.