The Best Real User Monitoring Tools

User experience plays a pivotal role in today's digital landscape. Every business with an online presence strives to improve this user experience, as it is known to have a direct impact on their business reputation and profitability.

That said, improving this user experience is not easy. This is because you must understand how users interact with your website or application under different circumstances. Given the complexity of this metric, many organizations are turning to automated Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools. The advantage of these tools is that they provide the insights you need about user behavior, so you can enhance your online presence.

Here is our list of the best real user monitoring tools:

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager – EDITOR’S CHOICE This large package of system monitoring tools includes a real user monitoring module that gathers, stores, and analyses website response data and will alert for performance failures. Runs on Windows Server, Linux, AWS, or Azure. Get a 30-day free trial.
2. Site24X7 – FREE TRIAL Gives you a peek into the performance of your web applications and the experience of users who interact with the different elements of your websites and applications. Get a 30-day free trial.
3. Pingdom Provides visibility into how your end-users are interacting with your site and the kinds of experiences they get through these interactions.
4. Datadog Offers the insights you need to map the user journeys for your website and web applications.
5. Sematext Experience Enables you to analyze real user sessions to detect anomalies and improve website performance.
6. Uptime.com A website monitoring service that you can use to check the downtime of your sites, optimize the overall speed of your site, and improve the health of your websites.
7. Dynatrace Maps the complete user journey to provide unmatched visibility into the performance of your websites.

Read on to learn more about what real user monitoring tools are, why you must use them, and some of the best choices available today.

What are Real User Monitoring Tools?

Real User Monitoring, or RUM, tools are software platforms that track and analyze user interactions with websites and applications in real time. At first glance, RUM tools may seem similar to synthetic monitoring tools, as both measure user interactions and experiences. However, a key difference is that synthetic monitoring tools use simulated user interactions, whereas RUM tools collect data from actual users. They leverage JavaScript tags or other lightweight agents to collect critical performance metrics, like page load times, rendering issues, and network latency, from the user's browser. After gathering the data, RUM tools analyze it to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of your users' experiences.

Benefits of Real User Monitoring Tools

Some important reasons to use RUM tools are:

• Accurate User Experience Assessment RUM tools provide authentic insights into how users perceive your websites or applications. Essentially, it aggregates real-time data on page load times, navigation paths, and user interactions to give you a realistic assessment of the end user experience. You can use this information to identify and address performance bottlenecks.
• Enhanced Performance Optimization Using RUM tools, you can identify the specific areas of your websites or applications that must be optimized for performance and user experience. You can analyze metrics like server response times and network latency to identify performance issues and, accordingly, fix them.
• Improved Conversion Rates Since user experience impacts conversion rates, you can closely monitor user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Specifically, you can look at areas where users may experience friction during their interactions. With these insights, you can make data-driven optimizations, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
• Proactive Issue Detection and Troubleshooting RUM tools provide real-time alerts and notifications when performance issues arise. You can immediately understand their root cause by looking at metrics like slow page load times, rendering problems, or broken links. Such immediate actions can minimize the impact on the user experience.
• Targeted User Segmentation You can better understand your users and segment them based on geography, device type, or browser version. This segmentation can help you understand how different user groups experience their websites or applications. Also, they can help with targeted optimizations tailored to specific user segments.

Now that you know how RUM tools can impact your business, let's look at some top choices of RUM tools available on the market today.

The Best Real User Monitoring Tools

Below are some of the best RUM tools to choose from. Let's take a detailed look at each of these tools.

1. ManageEngine Applications Manager – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine Applications Manager offers a wide range of services for monitoring the performance of IT assets and its real user monitoring module is part of the Web application monitoring services in the bundle. The tool gathers activity data directly from your Web server rather than spying on actual site visitors.

Here are some important features of the real user monitoring service of ManageEngine Applications Manager:

• End-User Experience Monitoring: ManageEngine Applications Manager’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) tracks real-time interactions of actual users with web applications. It monitors performance metrics like page load times, response times, and error rates to give administrators insights into how real users are experiencing the application, enabling quicker identification and resolution of performance issues.
• Geographic Performance Tracking: RUM allows administrators to monitor user interactions from different geographic locations, providing insights into how application performance varies across regions. This feature helps pinpoint location-specific issues such as latency or network-related problems, ensuring consistent performance for users regardless of their location.
• Detailed Transaction Analysis: ManageEngine Applications Manager’s RUM unit provides detailed analysis of user transactions, capturing every step in a user’s journey within the application. By tracking actions like logins, form submissions, and other key workflows, IT teams can identify bottlenecks or failures in specific transactions, improving overall application reliability and user satisfaction.

The real user monitoring service is just one of the tools in the Applications Manager package. You also get application discovery and dependency mapping, synthetic monitoring, and platform performance tracking. All of these services together enable website owners to identify performance problems and unpopular website features, which facilitates work to provide a better user experience.

The tool is delivered as a software package for Windows Server or Linux. You can also access it as a service on AWS and Azure. Applications Manager is offered in three editions:

• Free: Five assets-tracking activities (doesn’t include RUM)
• Professional: A single-site monitoring system. Starts at $395 per year (RUM is an add-on)
• Enterprise: A multi-site monitoring system. Starts at $9,595 per year (RUM is an add-on)

The real-user monitoring service is priced additionally at a rate per page views per month. The starting price is $65 for 100,000 page views per month. You can’t add the RUM service to the Free edition.

The Professional edition is available for a 30-day free trial.

2. Site24X7 RUM – FREE TRIAL

Site24X7 RUM provides insights into the performance of your websites and web applications by analyzing user interactions and experiences. With this information, you can better understand how users perceive your site and make the necessary changes to improve it.

Here are some important features of Site24X7 RUM.

Key Features:

• Simple to Install: A big selling point of Site24X7 RUM is its simple installation. All that you have to do is generate a JavaScript snippet and add it to the header or footer of your application's HTML code. With this simple action, Site24X7 will start tracking the performance data of your website and will relay it to you for further analysis and interpretation.
• Wide Support: Site24X7 works well across all popular browsers and their versions.  Some popular browsers that it supports include Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9 and above, Safari, Opera, Android, Chrome for Android, and more. Such wide support makes it ideal for testing different applications and websites.
• Extensive Dashboard: Site24X7 comes with an extensive dashboard that enables you to view the different metrics easily. You can use the overview to get a quick understanding of your website's health and performance. Additionally, you can also drill down into specific metrics for further information.

In all, Site24X7 RUM is a comprehensive tool that arms you with the data you need for informed actions and decision-making. Start a 30-day free trial.

Site24x7 Start a 30-day FREE Trial

3. Pingdom RUM

Pingdom RUM helps you gain the visibility you need to understand how users experience your website or application. You can even see how different users from around the world interact with your website. Using this information, you can improve the overall user experience and gain more from your websites.

Here are some important features of Pingdom.

Key Features:

• Gain Insights About Your Visitors: You can use Pingdom's map to understand where your users are coming from, what browsers they use, and their experience on your website. The key aspect here is that you can understand how external factors like network speeds and geopolitical restrictions impact users' experiences. More importantly, you can know how to improve.
• Use Filters to Offer Better Customization: You can use Pingdom to filter data based on specific attributes like devices, platforms, browsers, locations, etc. This way, you will get more insights into how you can customize the site to meet the specific preferences of different users.
• Troubleshoot Performance Issues: With regular monitoring, you can identify performance issues and troubleshoot them before they impact your end users. If you're a service provider, you can use the metrics gathered by Pingdom to know if you're achieving the SLA or not.

Based on such information, you can seamlessly improve the quality and performance of your website.

Pricing starts at $10 per month. Calculate your price. Start a free trial or sign up for an interactive demo.

4. Datadog RUM

Datadog RUM provides in-depth insights into the frontend performance of your applications and websites. When you use Datadog RUM, you can seamlessly correlate many metrics, traces, and logs to detect poor user experience. You can even resolve issues accordingly.

Here are the features of Datadog RUM.

Key Features:

• Troubleshoot and Resolve Errors Armed with the metrics generated by Datadog RUM, you can resolve JavaScript errors easily. These metrics make it easy to pinpoint the root cause of an error, so you can quickly troubleshoot it.
• Collect and Correlate the Metrics If aggregating metrics is one part of the task, making sense of them is what makes it truly complete. Datadog RUM helps you quickly correlate user actions, resources, and errors to help you better analyze usage patterns. Accordingly, you can evaluate the end-user experience.
• Gain a Context for Your Usage With Datadog, you can contextualize your user sessions and visualize how they interact with your websites and web applications. You can even use this platform to capture critical actions like checkout patterns that can prove to be highly relevant for your business.

Overall, Datadog can provide all the insights you need to make sense of how users interact with your websites and applications.

There are three pricing editions:

• Mobile RUM: Starts at $1.50 per 1,000 sessions per month.
• Browser RUM: Starts at $1.50 per 1,000 sessions per month.
• Browser RUM and Session Replay: Starts at $1.80 per 1,000 sessions per month.

Get started for free.

5. Sematext Experience

Sematext Experience is an advanced platform that analyzes user sessions in detail to help detect anomalies and send alerts in real time. You can even enhance your front-end performance with Sematext Experience.

Below are some important features of Sematext Experience.

Key Features:

• Identify Performance Bottlenecks: You can use Sematext to identify slow-loading pages across different geographies, so you can make the necessary changes accordingly. Sematext inspects images, fonts, CSS, JavaScript functions, and more to point you in the right direction for faster troubleshooting.
• Get Alerts in Real Time: When customers encounter issues, you are notified in real-time. This way, you can detect anomalies and address them at the earliest possible time to prevent any negative user experience. With Sematext, you can even set up alerts for Apdex scores, page load times, and more.
• Retrace User Journey: Sometimes, you might want to know how users came to a certain page, and Sematext provides this information by allowing you to retrace user journeys. With this platform, you can know where and how users faced a negative experience, so you can modify the pages or their settings accordingly.

In all, Sematext Experience helps you boost the customer experience by analyzing the information gleaned from real user sessions.

Pricing starts at $9 per month. Start a free trial and sign up to see a live demo.

6. Uptime.com

Uptime.com is a popular tool for ensuring that your websites are always up and running. It continuously monitors the performance and health of your websites and indicates potential issues before they impact the end-user experience.

The following are some key benefits of Uptime.com.

Key Features:

• Easy to Use: The biggest advantage of Uptime.com is its simplicity. All that you have to do is choose the domains and configure what you want to check. Within minutes, you can start monitoring your websites, web applications, email performance, and more.
• Get Meaningful Notifications: One of the biggest concerns about monitoring tools is the false positives they generate. This results in an undue waste of your time, effort, and resources. With Uptime, the chances of false alerts greatly reduce. Every check is tested at five different locations to ensure that an issue is consistent and warrants your attention. Only then is the issue sent as an alert notification to you.
• Custom Data Views: You can customize your dashboards to determine how you view your critical data. Such flexibility ensures that you're always on top of the metrics that matter most to you. Also, you can segment the metrics by accounts or other headers.

In all, Uptime.com is a reliable tool that ensures your websites are healthy and performing optimally.

Uptime.com offers three pricing editions:

• Essential—From $67/month.
• Premium—From $379/month
• Custom—$699/month

Try Uptime.com for free.

7. Dynatrace RUM

Dynatrace RUM provides full visibility into how users perceive and interact with your website. It examines the user experience across every digital transaction to understand the business impact of every user action.

The following are some salient features of Dynatrace RUM.

Key Features:

• In-depth Monitoring Visibility: Dynatrace is one of the few tools that provide in-depth insight into the user experience across every digital transaction. Unlike some tools, it doesn't provide a sample user experience but rather every transaction from the front end to the back end. Using this information, you can map the complete user journey.
• Removes Blind Spots: You can use the metrics and correlate them with your business objectives. This way, you can proactively identify problems and eliminate blind spots. Additionally, you can use these metrics to optimize the performance of your websites and web applications.
• Visual Insights: The dashboard is highly intuitive and gives all the relevant information in a single place. You can use these metrics to get an accurate picture of the state of your websites and applications.

Overall, Dynatrace is a visually appealing tool that provides the information you need to ensure that your web applications are performing optimally.

Final Thoughts

Real-time User Monitoring (RUM) tools are indispensable to better understand your users and provide an exceptional experience for them. Using these tools, you can track and analyze real-time user data and use it to gain invaluable insights into performance bottlenecks. Additionally, you can use these tools to optimize and troubleshoot your applications. We hope these tools help you provide a seamless experience for your users.