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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?”
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.
Application performance monitoring (APM) tracks IT services through the performance of:
APM tools help track metrics like:
These metrics give service providers insights into application performance and availability and how quickly they troubleshoot issues as they occur.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
Application downtime can occur for many reasons, including:
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:
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.
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.
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:
Alerty monitors databases such as:
It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:
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!
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:
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:
ControlUp's digital employee experience management platform monitors:
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.
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.
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:
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:
Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform that provides end-to-end observability, regardless of scale. The platform includes:
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:
This feature also includes a full topological model that incorporates:
The Digital Experience module is one of the critical components of the Dynatrace platform. It ensures that each monitored application, including:
EG Enterprise is a cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring platform that supports on-premises and cloud-hosted applications -- including:
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.
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:
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:
Businesses can enhance their applications with Middleware's Real User Monitoring (RUM) by gaining comprehensive user journey visibility and optimizing performance. It helps:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Alerty monitors databases such as:
It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:
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!