Add real user monitoring (RUM)
When it comes to website performance, there is one question that is more interesting than all others: How fast does your website load? Historically this hasn’t been easy to answer, especially taking into account all the variables involved like the visitors’ connection speed, browsers, devices, etc.
Now you can know exactly how your visitors are experiencing your website. Our Real User Monitoring, or RUM for short, gives you insight into performance and helps you answer questions like, how does your website really perform from a specific country or web browser.
Real User Monitoring is available on all Pingdom plans, and this is how you get started.
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In the left-hand menu, click Real User Monitoring under Monitoring, and then Add check in the top right corner menu to start creating a new RUM check.
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Enter the URL of the website you want to monitor (we support subdomains but no wildcards) and a website name. If you’d like to include subdomains, remember to click on the check box!
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Choose your load time thresholds using the slider bar. Pingdom applies the Apdex threshold.
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Select a timezone for site. This is important as we store all data in GMT by default. Please select your local timezone to display visitor data relative to your local time.
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Click Create site to create the RUM site.
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Now, the unique JavaScript for your RUM site will be displayed. You’ll have to add this in the
<head>tag of your website in order to begin gathering data. If you run your website on WordPress, there is an official Pingdom plugin to help you add your code snippet to the<head>section of your WordPress blog.
When a user is visiting your website this script basically asks the user’s browser:
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How much time did the website take to load completely?
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Of that time, how much was spent on network, backend and frontend? There are a great many things to consider like DNS, connection, DOM processing, rendering and much more. In other words how long did it take to wait for the server and network? And how much time was spent on processing?
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This information is sent to the Pingdom servers. This is then sorted and presented on our control panel in a way that is easy to understand. For privacy reasons we do not save the IP- addresses of your visitors.
How can you benefit from this? Knowing exactly how actual users, rather than a server, experience your site lets you catch issues that you might not have thought about when setting up external monitoring.
Also note that the JavaScript will download other scripts needed to gather your data. This is done asynchronously so it does not affect the performance in any way.
Navigation Notice: When the APM Integrated Experience is enabled, Pingdom shares a common navigation and enhanced feature set with other integrated experience products. How you navigate Pingdom and access its features may vary from these instructions.