Uptrends’ RUM is fresh from beta testing and ready for you to try free for 30 days! Real User Monitoring (RUM) brings you performance insights directly from your users’ experiences. RUM gives you detailed data that allows you to optimize your user experience and edge out the competition.
Actively monitoring your website with Synthetic Monitoring is a must, but Synthetic Monitoring is only a part of the solution. Knowing how your real users experience your site is key to delivering the best digital experience.
Your site’s visitors expect your site to perform well under all conditions, and they access your site using endless combinations of new and old devices, operating systems and their versions, browsers and their many versions, and locations.
RUM will tell you how your site is performing on all of these different devices, browsers, and operating systems allowing you to improve your sites digital experience for all of your users and keep them where they belong—your site.
How does Real User Monitoring work?
When you start your free trial, you input the domain for your site, and Uptrends generates a small script file. You place the script file in the <head> tag of your website’s pages.
The script sends this information to Uptrends via the cloud, and as fast as our servers can process the data, your users’ experiences appear in your customizable RUM dashboards. In almost real-time, you have aggregated real user experience data from *ALL of your visitors (no sampling here) that you can organize the information based on the users’ devices, operating systems, browsers, locations, and page viewed. You can quickly spot factors that negatively impact your users’ experiences and adjust your content and systems accordingly. Our interactive maps allow you to identify the geographic concentration of your users based on country and state.
You will be able to:
- Track which browsers and operating systems your users use to access your website and how fast your website loads for each of them.
- Monitor the true mobile experience by inspecting load times from visitors that access your website from their mobile device.
- Compare your website performance throughout different countries in the world and improve accordingly.
- Get a full overview of your visited pages and see how they compare performance wise.
Uptrends collects and aggregates all the data so that you can learn exactly how your users experience your content. You just can’t simulate that kind of data! For all of these things you get to inspect detailed metrics such as:
- Time to first byte
- Page ready time
- Send and receive durations
- DOM and render durations
- Total load time
How can I get a free trial?
Every account holder gets a free Real User Monitoring trial. How your trial works is based on whether or not you participated in the beta trial.
New trial accounts and non-beta participating accounts
If you are thinking about opening a trial account (and we certainly hope you do), you, of course, can start your RUM trial at the same time. If you already have an Uptrends account (trial or subscriber account) all you have to do to start your 30-day trial is log into your account and click the rocket ship at the top of the screen.
Follow the system prompts to set up your RUM website and generate a script that you will incorporate into the <head> section of your monitored pages. Once your script goes live and your users access your RUM enabled pages, you start gathering data that you can see almost instantaneously in your RUM dashboards. If you need help with your Real User Monitoring setup or have other questions or concerns, hop over to our Knowledge Base. As always, you can also send technical questions to our support team by opening a support ticket. Go ahead and give Real User Monitoring a try!
Beta participating accounts
Thank you so much for all of your valuable input during the trials. Real User Monitoring’s first release is more powerful and more flexible because of your ideas and suggestions (keep them coming). Together we will make future releases even better! Since you already have Real User Monitoring enabled and setup in your account, we have switched you to the RUM trial. Enjoy another 30-days of free RUM data. You can upgrade at any point before the end of the trial without any interruption in your monitoring. When ready, you can upgrade using the subscription options available under the Account menu in your Uptrends account. We also encourage you to reach out to your monitoring consultant for help picking the right Real User Monitoring plan for your website.
Still not sure?
If you’re hesitant to upgrade or try Real User Monitoring, let us help you make the decision that works for you. Our Knowledge Base has detailed setup instructions and articles concerning user privacy, RUM’s impact (or lack of impact) on your site, and information about how we calculate all of that juicy data. Our support team is just a support ticket away for any unanswered questions or concerns you may have. If you’re really lost and don’t know where to begin, schedule a one-on-one demo. During your demo, we can show you how it all works and answer your questions.
But I already have Google Analytics
Real User Monitoring does include some light data that Google Analytics also offers, but RUM is about the quality of your website’s user experience. The data you get from Google Analytics is mostly about user engagement and behavior while on your website. We love and use Google Analytics as do most of you, but when you look at Google Analytics’ site performance data closely, you quickly learn that very few of your user visits make it into the sampled data. Not only are you getting a small subset of users, but Google Analytics’ performance data has a higher latency than Uptrends Real User Monitoring. We deliver the information as fast as our servers can process the data in as close to real-time as you would expect. Keep using your analytics, just remember, when it comes to your user’s experience, RUM has all the data when you want it (now). Want to learn more about this topic? Check out this blog post.
I’m already testing for performance with Synthetic Monitoring, so why use RUM?
Synthetic Monitoring is extremely important. Using Synthetic Monitoring, you can simulate real user experiences and get detailed analysis on the performance of every page element (including third-party elements). It is a proactive approach where our worldwide network of checkpoints test and report on the health of your systems on regular intervals. Synthetic Monitoring tells you when your site is down or in trouble. Real User Monitoring is a passive monitoring approach. If users don’t visit your site, you don’t have data. If your site goes down, RUM can’t tell you about outages because it doesn’t know. Real User Monitoring runs on your users’ browsers. If your users can’t access your page, the script files never activate and send data. So through RUM, your only indicator of an outage is the lack of data. Synthetic Monitoring will capture the errors and outages before your visitors even know about them.
So in short: you use Real User Monitoring to view trends in your site’s actual performance, as experienced by your real users, and Synthetic Monitoring to test in a proactive fashion and get alerted when something breaks. We wrote a detailed blog article about this topic as well.
Conclusion
Thanks again to all of our beta testers, your help is appreciated by us and all future users of Uptrends Real User Monitoring. We are very excited about this milestone, and we assure you that you can expect more great things coming from Uptrends very soon! Look for other exciting announcements on our Facebook and Twitter feeds.
*Number of user visits recorded is dependent on the RUM package selected.
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