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Digital Experience and Real User Monitoring (RUM) Wins!

Dec 13, 2022 | Episode

Digital Experience and Real User Monitoring (RUM) are explained by Carly Richmond of Elastic APM.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, delivering a flawless digital experience is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. But how do you truly know what your users are experiencing? While synthetic monitoring has been a staple for many, it often misses the nuances of real-world user interactions. This is where Real User Monitoring (RUM) steps in, providing invaluable insights into the actual digital experience your audience encounters.

On a recent episode of the SMC Journal podcast, host Scott Moore delved into this critical topic with Carly Richmond from Elastic. This engaging conversation explored why understanding the digital experience is paramount, the limitations of synthetic monitoring, and the power of Real User Monitoring (RUM) within Elastic’s comprehensive observability platform.

The Multifaceted Nature of Digital Experience

Scott Moore kicked off the discussion by emphasizing that digital experience encompasses a wide range of elements, including observability, monitoring, testing, and tuning. Essentially, it’s the sum total of what a user perceives when interacting with your digital product. While many companies utilize synthetic monitoring – creating automated processes to simulate user actions – this approach often fails to capture the complete picture.

Carly Richmond, who works for Elastic and has a background in front-end web development and direct user collaboration in the financial sector, brought a unique perspective to the conversation. She highlighted that users don’t differentiate between front-end and back-end issues; they simply perceive something as “not working”. This underscores the need for a holistic approach to monitoring, encompassing both the backend infrastructure and the frontend user interface.

Beyond the Simulation: Why Real User Monitoring Matters

As Carly Richmond pointed out, synthetic monitoring, while useful for identifying if key user journeys are functioning as intended, doesn’t account for the unpredictable ways in which users interact with an application. Users might skip steps in a workflow, encounter unexpected errors, or experience performance bottlenecks that synthetic scripts don’t anticipate.

Real User Monitoring (RUM), on the other hand, captures exactly what users are doing from their own traffic. By passively collecting data from real user sessions, RUM provides a true understanding of the digital experience as it unfolds. This includes:

  • Performance metrics: RUM captures key performance indicators (KPIs) such as page load times, latency, and error rates as experienced by actual users. This allows you to identify areas where users might be encountering slowness or frustration.
  • User behavior: RUM tracks user interactions like clicks and navigations, providing insights into how users are actually using your application. This data can reveal whether users are engaging with new features or encountering difficulties in specific areas.
  • Google Core Web Vitals: RUM can capture and calculate Google’s Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift) based on real user data, providing crucial insights into the perceived performance and usability of your web application.
  • Error tracking: RUM captures errors that users encounter in real-time, allowing you to proactively identify and address issues before they significantly impact the digital experience.

Carly emphasized in her InfoQ article, “Are they really using it? Monitoring digital experience to determine feature effectiveness,” that understanding actual user behavior through RUM is crucial for determining if the features you build are truly providing value and solving user problems. This goes beyond simply knowing if a feature is technically functioning and delves into whether it’s being adopted and providing a positive digital experience.

Elastic’s Observability Platform: A Comprehensive Approach

Elastic offers a robust observability platform that seamlessly integrates Real User Monitoring (RUM) with other essential monitoring capabilities. As Scott Moore noted, Elastic, initially known for Elasticsearch, has evolved into a comprehensive observability solution. Their platform includes:

  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Provides deep insights into the performance of your backend services, allowing you to trace requests, identify bottlenecks, and understand the root cause of performance issues.
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Offers visibility into the health and performance of your underlying infrastructure, including servers, containers, and cloud resources.
  • Logs Monitoring: Centralizes and analyzes logs from various sources, enabling you to quickly identify and troubleshoot operational issues.
  • Synthetic Monitoring: Allows you to proactively monitor the availability and performance of your applications using simulated user journeys. Elastic is currently revamping its synthetics offering, including a beta recorder and support for Playwright scripts.
  • Profiling: With the acquisition of Optimizely, Elastic now offers continuous profiling capabilities through the universal profiler (currently in beta), providing deeper insights into code-level performance.

The power of Elastic’s platform lies in its ability to correlate data across these different pillars of observability. For example, with front-to-back tracing, you can connect frontend user interactions captured by RUM to backend service performance monitored by APM, providing a holistic view of the entire request lifecycle and pinpointing the exact source of a digital experience issue.

What Sets Elastic Apart in the Observability Landscape?

Carly Richmond highlighted several key differentiators for Elastic in the competitive observability market:

  • Flexible Deployment Options: Elastic offers both on-premise and cloud-based (SaaS) deployment options, catering to organizations with diverse infrastructure requirements.
  • Transparent Pricing: Elastic provides certain observability features for free for on-premise users, offering a cost-effective entry point compared to some competitors.
  • Open Standards Support: Elastic deeply integrates with open standards like OpenTelemetry, demonstrating a commitment to interoperability and making it easier for users to send data to the platform. Elastic actively contributes to the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.
  • Unified Data Platform: Built on Elasticsearch, Elastic excels at handling and analyzing large volumes of diverse data, enabling powerful search and visualization capabilities through Kibana.

While Gartner recognized Elastic as a Visionary in their Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability, noting its strong open-source commitment and flexible pricing, the report also pointed out the potential complexity of setting up and scaling the platform. Carly acknowledged this feedback, stating that Elastic is actively working on simplifying the user experience through improved documentation, feature prioritization, and advancements like the Elastic Agent and serverless Elasticsearch (on the roadmap).

Learn More About Enhancing Your Digital Experience

This insightful conversation between Scott Moore and Carly Richmond underscores the critical role of understanding and optimizing the digital experience. By embracing Real User Monitoring (RUM) alongside a comprehensive observability platform like Elastic, organizations can gain unprecedented visibility into how users are truly interacting with their applications, leading to faster issue resolution, improved performance, and ultimately, happier users.

Don’t miss the full episode to hear more about Elastic’s approach to observability and Carly’s valuable insights into leveraging RUM for feature effectiveness!

See this other episode about digital experience as well.

Show Notes About Digital Experience:

Below is a link used in the episode about Elastic APM and how it is used to gather deep information about the digital experience, including Real User Monitoring (RUM).

https://www.infoq.com/articles/monitor-digital-experience-feature-effectiveness/

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