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What Is End User Performance Monitoring? Methods, Metrics & 10 Best Tools

When your website has a slow loading time, your visitors won't stick around to see what you have to offer. They will bounce back to their search results and click on your competitor's link instead. This scenario is all too familiar for business owners, especially if the website performance issues persist and negatively affect sales. End user performance monitoring tools can help you avoid this situation by tracking the metrics that matter to your customers. This blog will feature how these front end monitoring tools work, why they are essential to your business, and how to get started.

Alerty's solution, frontend monitoring, is a valuable tool to help you achieve your objectives, such as understanding End User Performance Monitoring tools and practices. It focuses on tracking data that affects your customers or visitors to your website to give you a clearer picture of their experience.

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Table of Contents

What Is End User Performance Monitoring?

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End-user performance monitoring, often called end-user experience monitoring, is how users interact with your application. When you build and deploy an application, users start engaging with it in various ways, including:

These interactions give you valuable insights into their experience and how well your application meets their needs.

User Interaction Tracking

At its core, end-user performance monitoring involves tracking and analyzing these interactions. By understanding what users are doing and how they’re doing it, you can get a clear picture of how your application performs from their perspective. But it doesn’t stop there. 

This type of monitoring also looks at how well your application is delivered to the user. For instance, if your app takes too long to load or crashes frequently, it can negatively impact the user’s experience.

Why Does End User Performance Monitoring Matter?

AWS cites that 88% of us won’t return to a website after a bad user experience. Visitors will likely get frustrated and leave if your website is slow or buggy, hurting your business or brand. Browser monitoring allows you to catch issues before they become big problems, ensuring your site is always performing at its best. 

It’s like having a backstage crew working around the clock to ensure the show goes off without a hitch, keeping your audience happy and engaged.

How Can End User Performance Monitoring Improve My Application?

By gathering this data, you can pinpoint areas that need improvement, ensuring your application runs smoothly and provides a positive user experience. Whether fixing bugs, optimizing load times, or enhancing functionality, end-user performance monitoring helps you create a better, more efficient application that meets user expectations.  

Why Do You Need End User Performance Monitoring?

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User experience is everything. End-user performance monitoring provides critical, actionable insights into how your application performs from the perspective of your users.  With this intelligence, you can identify which parts of your application are performing well and which parts aren’t.

Identify the Parts of the Application That Perform Well and Poorly

When you build an application, it’s common to have different parts based on your service. If you’re building an e-commerce website, you probably will have categories for:

  • Men
  • Women
  • Kids
  • Special offers, etc.

Design Performance Analysis

Through end-user performance monitoring, you can identify which parts of the website are more pleasing to the user. Another example would be if you have used different designs (colors, templates, widget shapes, etc.) in your application. 

End-user performance monitoring would help you understand which design gives the user a better experience.

Understanding the Performance of a New Feature

Knowing how well it works is essential if your application has been online for quite some time and you’ve added a new feature. End-user performance monitoring helps you analyze the performance of the newly added feature.

Identify Page Load Problems and Script Issues

When you get information on user experience, you will also find details regarding the time the page takes to load. This can help you identify and fix page load and other network issues. An application's load time is important in user experience because no user wants to keep looking at the loading icon for long.

End-user performance monitoring will also identify script issues that will help you fix navigation problems and any possible glitches in the application with respect to how it’s designed to perform under ideal conditions.

Decide Where to Invest More

Knowing the user’s experience will give you an idea of what the user does and doesn’t like. This will help you prioritize your plan and decide which part of the application to focus more on.

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How Can End User Performance Monitoring Help Your Business?

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End-user performance monitoring (EUM) is like having a backstage pass to see how your customers and employees interact with your digital platforms in real-time. It goes beyond just tracking if your website or app is up and running; it dives into how users experience your services from their end. This kind of insight is crucial because, in today’s world, a smooth user experience is directly tied to your business's success.

Imagine you’re running an online store. If your site is slow or glitchy, customers will likely leave before completing a purchase. EUM helps you catch these issues early by monitoring everything from load times to the actual performance of your web pages or applications as experienced by users.

Remote Performance Analysis

It’s especially important now, with more people working remotely, where performance can be affected by factors outside your control, like their internet connection or home Wi-Fi.

What’s excellent about EUM is that it doesn’t just focus on problems within your own network. It also considers the broader environment, including cloud services and external providers, giving you a complete picture of what your users are experiencing.

Business Value Analysis

This level of detail helps you fix issues faster and understand how your digital tools perform in real-world conditions. 

For businesses, this means happier customers, more productive employees, and better business outcomes. When you can monitor and improve the end-user experience, you’re not just keeping your systems running smoothly but also protecting your brand’s reputation and driving your business forward.

5 Common End User Performance Monitoring Methods

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1. Real User Monitoring: Accurate Insights on Actual Users

Real User Monitoring (RUM) delivers precise data about how real users interact with your application. As the name implies, RUM tracks the actual performance of your application as experienced by your users, allowing you to gather the most reliable information about the end-user experience. 

Also known as passive monitoring, RUM collects user experience data directly from the user's browser or via the cloud. The most common way to capture real user data is by using JavaScript injections.

How Does This Work?

While building an application, you determine which parts of the application you want to capture data from and inject some JavaScript code to monitor user actions in that part of your application. When the user accesses your application, the JavaScript code will be triggered on specific user actions and capture the required data.

Real-World Accuracy

Because RUM tracks performance based on user actions, it provides the most accurate results. When you write a script to mimic user behavior, like synthetic monitoring, you might overlook a few user actions. Real user monitoring will cover those actions.

When you use real user monitoring, you don’t just capture information about the user activity. You can also capture information such as:

  • Page views
  • Browser versions
  • User location
  • Page load time

What About The Drawbacks? 

Implementing real user monitoring does not affect the application's operation. The main drawback is that the results are only reliable when there is a decent amount of traffic. If no or very few users are using the application, the results are insufficient to take action.

2. Synthetic Monitoring: Simulating User Actions

Synthetic monitoring, also known as active monitoring or proactive monitoring, involves using a robot to monitor the end-user experience. To use synthetic monitoring, you must write scripts to simulate the user’s actions in your application.

You might be wondering, “How would simulating help? If we need to monitor end-user behavior, then why would we use a robot to simulate user actions?”

Synthetic Testing Benefits

You don’t need a real user to analyze the performance of your application. You can write a script to do what a real user would do and see how your application behaves. So, when you use synthetic monitoring, you learn about the availability of your application and its performance. 

As a bonus, if you use synthetic monitoring, you can fix any issues found before making the application available to your real users.

3. Application Performance Monitoring: Tracking Apps to Improve the End User Experience

Application performance monitoring (APM) tracks IT services through the performance of:

  • Web applications
  • Mobile apps 
  • SaaS applications

APM Metrics

APM tools help track metrics like:

  • Error rates
  • Downtime
  • Response time

These metrics give service providers insights into application performance and availability and how quickly they troubleshoot issues as they occur.

4. Device-Based End User Monitoring: Tracking the User's Device Performance

Using a heavy application utilizes a lot of system resources, which in turn affects user experience. You can use device-based end-user monitoring to monitor the load your application is putting on the device being used by the user.

The user might be using one of various devices, including:

  • Laptops
  • Mobile phones
  • Tablets, etc

Resource Optimization

You can use a light code to check the resources being utilized by your application on the user’s device. This will help you optimize your application for different devices. When you optimize your application, it runs smoothly on the user’s system, improving the user’s experience.

5. Business Activity Monitoring: Tracking Performance to Improve Applications and Ensure End User Satisfaction

Business activity monitoring (BAM) involves tracking critical business processes in real-time to gain insights into organizational performance and health. It encompasses collecting, analyzing, and presenting data related to various business activities, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions promptly.

BAM integrates data from diverse sources across an organization, including:

  • Enterprise applications
  • Databases
  • Sensors

Holistic Data Analysis

This holistic data aggregation provides a comprehensive view of ongoing activities, facilitating the identification of bottlenecks and inefficiencies. By monitoring these activities in real-time or near real-time, BAM enables proactive intervention to address issues promptly and optimize processes for enhanced performance and productivity. 

Key types of business activity analytics that BAM can monitor include:

  • Process Governance: Monitoring adherence to defined processes and workflows to ensure consistency and efficiency. 
  • Compliance Monitoring: Tracking regulatory compliance and internal policy adherence to mitigate risks and ensure legal conformity. 
  • Process Completion Rates: Analyzing the rate and efficiency of completing business processes to improve operational effectiveness and resource allocation.

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3 Common End User Performance Monitoring Metrics

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1. What is Network Latency, and Why Does It Matter for Monitoring End User Performance?

Network latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another across a network. EUEM tools monitor network latency to detect slow applications and improve end-user performance. 

High latency can cause frustrating delays for end users, damaging their experience and hurting business outcomes.

2. Application Downtime is the Enemy of Good End User Performance

Application downtime can occur for many reasons, including:

  • Network interruptions
  • Coding errors
  • Cloud vendor failures
  • Scheduled updates
  • Security breaches

No matter the cause, extended application downtime can negatively impact user experience (to say nothing of lost revenue and clients). The following are crucial to minimizing downtime:

  • Monitoring the mean time to detection (MMTD)
  • The time it takes to detect an issue
  • The mean time to, remediation (MTTR)
  • The amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an error once it is detected

3. Bandwidth and Throughput: What’s the Difference?

Bandwidth measures the volume of data that can pass through a network at any given time, an important metric when monitoring application performance. Unlike latency, which measures a system’s speed, bandwidth measures capacity. Organizations want to ensure their network can handle traffic and user activity, particularly during peak use.

Throughput Analysis

Understanding throughput is often even more valuable. While bandwidth measures possible capacity, throughput measures the average amount of data that passes through a network in a specific timeframe, considering the impact of latency. It reflects the number of data packets that arrive successfully and the amount of data packet loss. 

Monitoring tools can monitor network traffic and system storage, allowing IT teams to optimize systems and plan to keep applications running efficiently, even during peak traffic periods.

10 Best End User Performance Monitoring Tools

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1. Alerty: Your Go-To Tool for Front End Monitoring

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS, tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

RUM and USM Features

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

2. Cisco AppDynamics: Performance Monitoring That Integrates Business Metrics

AppDynamics is a full-stack observability platform that correlates performance with key business metrics to identify and resolve performance issues. It automatically tracks the flow of traffic requests while providing:

  • Business transaction monitoring
  • Anomaly detection
  • Root cause diagnostics 
  • Full-stack analytics

Security Integration

AppDynamics also combines application and security monitoring, which enables IT to quickly identify vulnerabilities and resolve issues while breaking down silos between ops teams and security teams. The platform provides an end-user monitoring component that tracks key metrics across devices, browsers, and third-party services to capture the following:

  • Data about errors
  • Crashes
  • Network requests 
  • Other events

3. ControlUp DEX: Digital Employee Experience Management

ControlUp's digital employee experience management platform monitors:

  • Physical endpoints
  • Virtual desktops
  • SaaS 
  • Web applications

It offers end-to-end visibility into servers, desktops, users, and applications, enabling IT to identify and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks. The ControlUp DEX platform consists of three main products: ControlUp Real-Time DX, which gathers data about the end-user experience. IT admins can perform real-time monitoring through dashboards that make it possible to pinpoint and proactively fix problems.

Centralized Management

Through the Solve user interface, they can see the entire environment and search and group resources. They can use the metrics to find root causes and remediate issues such as excessive logon durations or slow application responses. Admins can also set up custom alerts to meet their specific circumstances. 

ControlUp also provides free utilities for DEX management. Administrators can use the NetScaler add-on to monitor NetScaler environments or the IGEL integration pack to manage IGEL devices. Another available offering is the application profiler, which measures, analyzes, and benchmarks application load times.

4. Datadog: Monitoring & Security at Scale

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform that enables IT and DevOps teams to see inside their application stacks, even at scale. With over 600 built-in integrations, Datadog aggregates metrics and events across various:

  • Systems
  • Applications 
  • Services

Organizations can trace requests across distributed systems and monitor their code using open-source tracking libraries. Datadog provides auto-generated service overviews to track application performance, graphs, and alerts based on error rates or latency percentiles. Admins can search, filter, and analyze logs and navigate between:

  • Logs
  • Metrics
  • Request traces

5. Dynatrace: End-to-End Observability

Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform that provides end-to-end observability, regardless of scale. The platform includes:

  • Infrastructure monitoring
  • APM
  • DEM
  • Application security
  • Business analytics
  • Cloud automation

IT teams can use AI-powered analytics to predict and resolve issues before they impact users, as the platform provides a view of their environment that includes:

  • Logs
  • Metrics
  • Traces

Topological Modeling

This feature also includes a full topological model that incorporates:

  • Code-level detail
  • Entity relationships
  • Behavioral and user experience data

The Digital Experience module is one of the critical components of the Dynatrace platform. It ensures that each monitored application, including:

  • Web
  • Mobile
  • IoT applications are functional and available

6. EG Innovations EG Enterprise: Monitoring for Modern & Legacy Applications

EG Enterprise is a cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring platform that supports on-premises and cloud-hosted applications -- including:

  • Deployments in mobile
  • Hybrid cloud
  • Virtualized environments

The platform offers tools to monitor modern and legacy applications that detect, diagnose, and resolve application issues, all from a centralized interface. It also includes tools specific to DEM. The platform provides built-in user experience metrics, proactive alerting, and actionable insights.

7. Raygun: Monitoring Tools for Web & Mobile Apps

Raygun is a monitoring tool suite that provides visibility into the quality and performance of web and mobile apps. The platform includes three primary tools: 

Real User Insights

With Raygun, IT teams can gather detailed information about how users access applications, how they perform, and what issues users might face. Administrators can also triage support requests and drill down into error or performance details. The Real User Monitoring product provides insights into front-end performance issues that can impact mobile or web users. 

Administrators can look into slow pages, diagnose issues at the instance level, or view a waterfall breakdown of load times across components. The tool also has language support for:

  • React
  • Angular
  • JavaScript
  • Xamarin
  • iOS
  • Android

8. Middleware: Real User Monitoring to Optimize Performance

Businesses can enhance their applications with Middleware's Real User Monitoring (RUM) by gaining comprehensive user journey visibility and optimizing performance. It helps:

  • Track real-time user activity
  • Identify performance bottlenecks
  • Troubleshoot issues with core web vitals such as LCP, FID, and CLS

Action Replay

Users can capture business-critical actions like checkout clicks and analyze full transactions for web and mobile apps. One particularly interesting feature in Middleware's RUM is session recordings and replays. 

Businesses can use it to monitor frontend performance and pinpoint errors and warnings. They can also correlate issues faster by automatically collecting and analyzing all user actions and resources.

9. Nexthink Infinity: Analytics for Employee Experience Management

Nexthink launched Infinity, a cloud-based analytics, automation, and remediation platform, in 2022. The platform uses machine learning and benchmarking to enable IT teams to diagnose issues, automatically find their root causes, and remediate devices. 

It provides visibility across all environments and proactively identifies employee experience issues. Nexthink Infinity is a comprehensive DEX tool that allows IT teams to remediate over a million workspaces.

10. Riverbed Alluvio Aternity: Digital Experience Management

Alluvio Aternity is a digital experience management platform that provides actionable user experience insights while helping to predict and prevent business disruptions. The platform collects and stores technical telemetry from various devices and applications, including cloud-native services.

Agent Deployment

To facilitate data collection, admins must install the Aternity agent on application infrastructure and end-user devices, where it can measure what the user sees. Alluvio Aternity combines IT service benchmarking, device performance monitoring, APM, and EUEM into a single platform. 

It can collect user experience information from any application or device and diagnose issues at the application, device, or network level.

Related Reading

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering application performance monitoring, database monitoring, and incident management. It supports technologies like:

  • NextJS
  • React
  • Vue
  • Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues

Alerty monitors databases such as:

  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • RDS, tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

RUM and USM Features

It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

  • Stripe API
  • OpenAI
  • Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

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