Modern user interfaces and exceptional employees aren’t just enough to deliver optimal DX/Digital Experience. Mission-critical technologies that perform well, easy to use, exceptional interaction with every touchpoint of an organization. Operational excellence has become more challenging as it relies on more complex infrastructure and technologies, and users with different background and experience, and an ever evolving world that demands more, faster and better. Organizations need a tool to manage and improve DX, ideally proactively or reactively.
These tools are called all-in-one-APM-RUM-BPM-Automation solutions. In this article, we are focusing on the RUM side, yet it is critical to note that organizations need a modern and all-in-one monitoring, analytics, and automation platform, that provides User Experience, Process and Technology insights and not only helps proactively detect issues but also helps resolve them.
6 of the best Real User Monitoring Tools and how to choose one
Here is a list comparing 6 of the best real user monitoring (RUM) tools (and we have been in this since 2001):
Germain UX
germainAPM’s real user experience platform is helping companies like American Airlines, eBay, Anz Bank, General Electric, Volvo, Pepsi improve their user experience at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.
A Real User Monitoring solution that offers 100% visibility in your User Experience of your website or other web application.
germainAPM allows you to record individual user sessions, replay them whenever you like to watch what a user did, identify the most expensive user experience issues, identify the root-cause of a user issue from a javascript failure, a slow http request, a crashing back-end application code, a corrupted database query/SQL, etc
This technology is vastly different than traditional APM and RUM systems. See how quickly you can detect and resolve issues when your APM system records user sessions and performs automatic root-cause analysis. This, in turn, leads to lower churn rates and improved user experience.
In light of the corona crisis, businesses are being forced to cut costs, work smarter, and eliminate inefficiencies. GermainAPM is offering financial relief through a special offer that has cut expenses by 50-600% for companies.
Features
- Real User Session Recording & Replay
- Issue Diagnosis (end-to-end, page, javascript, backend code, sql, etc)
- Proactive Detection
- Automatic Resolution (flexible automation)
- DX to Technology mapping
Pricing
- $29->$5K/month (1-12 months) & $51->$12K/month (after) | Unlimited & Free Help | Pricing details here
Pros
- The cheapest solution, by far!
- End-to-end insights (ux, process, tech)
- Correlation (e.g. for transaction tracking across data sources)
- All-in-one APM, RUM, BPM, BI and Automation
Cons
- Lack of collaboration features
- Support from US and Europe timezones
Read more about our RUM solution
Fullstory
Fullstory is one of the best website monitoring service that offers complete real-time visibility of digital experience. You can monitor the activity of all mobile and web application users across all devices and browsers to assess and improve user satisfaction.
With Fullstory you can also collect business-relevant metrics, allowing you to correlate performance issues with potential business impact.
Features
- Analytics
- Collaboration
- Record and Replay
- Search
- Integrate
Pricing
- Expensive. Available on request here
Pros
- Modern UI
- Collaboration features
- Integrations
Cons
- Expensive
- Lack User Experience insights
Hotjar
Hotjar‘s User Experience monitoring solution that offers complete User Experience insights for your website.
Great heatmap and analytics helping find UX frictions. Built for Marketers, Product Managers and UX Designers.
Features
- Heatmap
- User Session Recording
- Conversion funnel
Pricing
- Pricey and available here
Pros
- HeatMap
- Session Replay
- Integrations
Cons
- No User Issue Diagnosis
- Lack of User Behavior insights
- Old UI
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is one of the oldest solution on the market, Dynatrace has clearly a significant amount of features in the area of monitoring, analytics and automation for your website, technologies. You can map the whole user journey.
Awareness into performance issues and potential business impact. Ability to resolve problems proactively with real-time data
Features
- Digital Experience
- Application Performance
- Infrastructure Monitoring
- Digital Business Experience
- AIops
Pricing
- Significantly expensive
Pros
- Lots of features
- Deep dive in Tech stack
- All-in-one APM, RUM and BPM
Cons
- Missing tones of User Behavior and Issue insights
- Not Easy to use
NewRelic Browser
NewRelic monitors the entire life cycle of a page or a view, from the moment users enter the app until they disconnect. User-centric perceived performance. Easily isolates latency of network vs. backend services. Utilizes lab and field data to ensure successful deployments. Understands how page speed impacts bounce, abandonment, and user satisfaction. Provides deep insights for JavaScript errors.
Features
- End-to-end visibility
- Incident Troubleshooting (Ajax, Java, Calls, etc)
- Distributed tracing
- Synthetic Lab
- Browser Pageviews and Page Load Times
- Session Traces
- Single page application(SPA) support
Pricing
- Expensive, check it out here
Pros
- Easy to deploy
- Supports many Technologies
Cons
- Missing UX Insights
- Lack of Issue Diagnosis
- Hard to scale
AppDynamics Browser RUM
AppDynamics’s RUM tool monitors users’ customer journey and experience across the globe through a single pane of glass. Understands the regional variability on your website or single page application (SPA) experience. Resolves web performance bottlenecks
Features
- Single page application (SPA) experience
- Customer journey and experience
- Browser snapshot waterfalls
- Dynamic baselining
- User Sessions Tracking
Pricing
- Pricing available on request here
Pros
- Quickly resolve web performance
- Accurate browser-user insights
Cons
- Missing tones of UX insights
- No end-to-end issue diagnosis
- Another pricey tool
How to Choose a Real User Monitoring Tool
Some points to take into account before selecting a RUM:
Features
Focus on the actual benefits. Features are obviously important, but more importantly, select the tool that will help your organization solve mission-critical issues, at a fraction of the cost. The most basic RUM tool should be able to:
- Real User Session Record/Replay
- End-to-end User Issue diagnosis (Behavior insights, Technology insights @code, sql… levels)
- Browser-level synthetic click
- Smart & Flexible Automation
- Intelligent Alerting
- Easy-to-create your own Dashboard and Reporting
- No-technical skills needed to Find Insights
- Collaboration features
Ease of Use
Focus on how quickly it takes to solve your critical business problems, don’t get impressed with tools that quickly show data on a pretty dashboard, focus on the ones that effectively help you detect and solve your mission-critical problems. Also critical to select the ones that follow a consistent approach when building their UI, making easier to use
Exceptional & Free-of-charge Support
Choose the organizations that are willing to help you, at no charge, grow your RUM within your organization. You will find it very hard to find them…most charge for this. And that support needs to be effective, provided by devops, ux or bizops experts
Ready-to-evolve RUM
Look out for organizations that have built a RUM that can evolve as technologies evolve. Not every RUM can easily switch javascript framework, or migrate from a relation database to noSQL data store. You will need this flexibility if you like to grow this technology within your organization
Licensing
Forget about all these feature-driven pricing models and opt of the ones that focus on benefit/volume. And when you look at volume, is it in the thousands, hundred of thousands, millions…of transactions. and what type of transactions are they talking about. And finally select the RUM that provide a clear roadmap, a product roadmap, that is inline with your mission
What RUM Tool Will You Use?
Great user experience on a web application is just one of piece of your business puzzle, which is what RUM solutions deliver. if you are looking at growing our organization with a platform, you need more than a RUM, you need an all-in-one APM-RUM-BPM-Automation platform. A platform that is easy to use, can scale. A platform that can track your Digital Experience and is able to correlate customer events across technologies, application, etc
Check out germainAPM,an all-in-one APM-RUM-BPM-Automation platform that will help your organization (and your career) scale! ????
