What is Real User Monitoring?

Datadog’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives you end-to-end visibility into the real-time activity and experience of individual users. RUM solves four types of use cases for monitoring web and mobile applications:

• Performance: Track the performance of web pages, mobile application screens, user actions, network requests, and your frontend code.
• Error Management: Monitor the ongoing bugs and issues and track them over time and versions.
• Analytics / Usage: Understand who is using your application (country, device, OS), monitor individual users journeys, and analyze how users interact with your application (most common page visited, clicks, interactions, and feature usage).
• Support: Retrieve all of the information related to one user session to troubleshoot an issue (session duration, pages visited, interactions, resources loaded, and errors).

A user session is a user journey on your web or mobile application lasting up to four hours. A session usually includes pageviews and associated telemetry. If a user does not interact with an application for 15 minutes, the session is considered complete. A new session starts when the user interacts with the application again.

What is Session Replay?

Datadog’s Session Replay allows you to capture and visually replay the web browsing experience of your users.

Combined with RUM performance data, Session Replay is beneficial for error identification, reproduction, and resolution, and provides insights into your web application’s usage patterns and design pitfalls.

Get started

Select an application type to start collecting RUM data:

Capabilities and platform support

Note: The Datadog Flutter SDK is not supported for MacOS, Windows, or Linux.

The following table shows which RUM capabilities are supported on each platform:

Supported endpoints for SDK domains

All Datadog SDKs traffic is transmitted over SSL (default 443) to the following domains:

Explore Datadog RUM

Access RUM by navigating to Digital Experience > Performance Summary.

Select an application from the top navigation, or follow the setup instructions for browser or mobile to add your first application.

Tip: To open RUM from Datadog’s global search, press Cmd/Ctrl + K and search for real user monitoring.

Performance monitoring summary

Browser Performance Summary	Mobile Performance Summary

The RUM Performance Monitoring summary page provides relevant and actionable insights for both web and mobile applications. You have a tailored experience for each platform that helps you:

• Focus on key data points by platform, such as the UI latency for web or mobile crashes
• Monitor application health through familiar KPIs, such as Core Web Vitals for web apps or hang rate for iOS, to assess app reliability
• Dive into investigations directly from interactive widgets without leaving the page

For web apps, use the search bar to filter data, identify slow pages, and follow the UI to the RUM Optimization Inspect page.

For mobile apps, review recent crashes at the bottom of the page and use the Error Tracking side panel for troubleshooting.

Out-of-the-box dashboards

Analyze information about your user sessions, performance, mobile applications, frustration signals, network resources, and errors collected automatically with out-of-the-box RUM dashboards.

RUM Explorer and visualizations

View user sessions in segments, such as checking when latency impacts your premium customers, with visualizations. Explore data, save views, and create monitors on your customized searches.

Integration with logs, APM, and profiler

View your backend traces, logs, and infrastructure metrics down to the exact line of code impacting your application performance, corresponding to user experiences and reported issues.

Error tracking and crash reporting

Get automated alerts on outliers and groups of errors, timeouts, and crashes to significantly reduce your MTTR with Error Tracking.

Web and mobile vitals

View performance scores and telemetry for browser applications such as Core Web Vitals and Mobile Vitals for iOS and tvOS or Android and Android TV applications.

Web view tracking

Collect information from your native web applications and explore hybrid views with Web View Tracking for iOS and tvOS or Android and Android TV.

Explore Datadog Session Replay

Session replays

Watch browser recordings of real users interacting with your website and set privacy controls for your organization.

Developer tools

Access triggered logs, errors, and performance information when troubleshooting application issues using Browser Dev Tools.

Permissions

By default, all users can change an application’s RUM configuration.

Use granular access controls to limit the roles that may edit a particular application’s RUM configuration:

1. While viewing an application’s RUM configuration, click on the Edit application button at the top of the screen. A dropdown appears.
2. Select Manage App Permissions.
3. Click Restrict Access.
4. The dialog box updates to show that members of your organization have Viewer access by default.
5. Use the dropdown to select one or more roles, teams, or users that may edit the notebook.
6. Click Add.
7. The dialog box updates to show that the role you selected has the Editor permission.
8. Click Save.

Note: To maintain your edit access to the application, the system requires you to include at least one role that you are a member of before saving.

You must have edit access to restore general access to a restricted application. Complete the following steps:

1. While viewing an application’s RUM configuration, click on the Edit application button at the top of the screen. A dropdown appears.
2. Select Manage App Permissions.
3. Click Restore Full Access.
4. Click Save.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Check out the latest Datadog RUM releases! (App login required)RELEASE NOTES Join an interactive session to gain insights through Real User MonitoringFOUNDATION ENABLEMENT Introducing Datadog Real User MonitoringBLOG Improve mobile user experience with Datadog Mobile Real User MonitoringBLOG Best practices for monitoring mobile app performanceBLOG Make sense of application issues with Datadog Error TrackingBLOG Unify APM and RUM data for full-stack visibilityBLOG Use geomaps to visualize your app data by locationBLOG Get better RUM data with our custom React componentsBLOG Monitor your hybrid mobile applications with DatadogBLOG How Datadog's Technical Solutions team uses RUM, Session Replay, and Error Tracking to resolve customer issuesBLOG Best practices for monitoring static web applicationsBLOG RUM Browser Data CollectedDOCUMENTATION Best practices for monitoring progressive web applicationsBLOG