Real user monitoring
Real User Monitoring (RUM) measures user experience with your website and also tracks user activity. RUM is available for both standard multi-page websites and single-page applications. Enable and configure RUM for your website to gain insight into where your users are located, as well as the browsers and operating systems used by your users. You also get in-depth information about how your website or web application performs when users access your website.
How to collect RUM data
Enable and configure RUM while adding or editing a website entity. While configuring your website entity, do the following in the Add Data dialog:
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Enable RUM: In the Basics page under monitoring options, click to enable Real User Monitoring.
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Add RUM to your website's code: In the RUM page, click
to copy the RUM JavaScript code to your clipboard. Insert the copied code into the HTML of your website. The JavaScript should be added to every page of your website, either by pasting it before the </body>tag of each page of your website or by using a service like Google Tag Manager. -
Define RUM properties: In the RUM page, click to move the slider to the time in seconds you want to consider a satisfied load time for your website.
The recommended (default) setting is four seconds based on the user's perception of satisfactory application responsiveness and the Application Performance Index (Apdex) standard. When you change the load time threshold, the tolerating and frustrated load times change as well. For more information about the Apdex standard, satisfactory load times, tolerating load times, and frustrated load times, see Defining the Application Performance Index.
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If your website is a single page application, click to select Monitor as a single page application.
RUM data will not appear in SolarWinds Observability until users visit your website with the JavaScript code.
For complete instructions detailing how to add or modify a website entity for monitoring, see Add a website.
What data is collected
When a user visits a website containing the RUM JavaScript code, the following information is gathered from the browser and sent to SolarWinds Observability:
- What geographic location is the user located?
- What browser is being used?
- What operating system is being used?
- How much time did the website take to load?
- How much of that time was spent on network, frontend, and backend processes?
- How much time was spent on processing this information?
What prevents data from being collected
Domain aliases
RUM data can be received and associated with your entity only if the public URL your customers visit matches the URL defined for your website entity. If you use a domain alias to map multiple domains to the same content and a visitor uses a domain that differs from the URL defined for your website, no data will be collected for that visitor.
Incompatibility with the Boomerang library
The RUM script uses the Boomerang JavaScript library for several key functions and is subject to the same code limitations and compatibilities as Boomerang. For example, the <MemoryRouter> router is not supported by the RUM script; all other router components for ReactJS and Angular10+ are supported. Data about some of your users' actions may not be collected if incompatible functions are used in your website.
Visitor access to the RUM script disabled
To collect and send RUM data to SolarWinds Observability, your visitors must have unrestricted access to the following domains: rum-agent.xx-yy.cloud.solarwinds.com and rum.collector.xx-yy.cloud.solarwinds.com, where xx-yy is determined by the URL you use to access SolarWinds Observability, described in Data centers and endpoint URIs. If your website visitors' firewall or access control settings restrict access to those URLs or if they are using ad blocker tools to block Javascript calls, the RUM data will not be collected or sent to SolarWinds Observability.