Real User Measurements

Chapter 5. What Does a RUM Implementation Look Like on the Web?

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguishes one man from another.

Ernest Hemingway

Even though this book is ostensibly about RUM “in and of itself,” the context of RUM on the modern Internet demands that we give that primary use case a thorough working over. So, what does RUM on the Internet look like? Let’s review some of the details.

Alistair Croll and Sean Power, in their excellent book Complete Web Monitoring, detailed the six steps of RUM:

Capture

The monitoring system captures page and object hits from several sources—JavaScript on a browser, a passive network tap, a load balancer, or a server and its logfiles.

Sessionization

The system takes data about these hits and reassembles it into a record of the pages and components of individual visits, along with timing information.

Problem detection

Objects, pages, and visits are examined for interesting occurrences—errors, periods of slowness, problems with navigation, and so on.

Individual visit reporting

You can review individual visits re-created from captured data. Some solutions replay the screens as the visitors saw them; others just present a summary.

Reporting and segmentation

You can look at aggregate data, such as the availability of a particular page or the performance on a specific browser.

Alerting

Any urgent issues detected by the system may trigger alerting mechanisms.

In this section, ...