Overview
Session Replay expands your user experience monitoring by allowing 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.
The RUM Browser SDK is open source and leverages the open source rrweb project.
How the Session Replay recorder works
The Session Replay recorder is part of the RUM Browser SDK. The recorder takes a snapshot of the browser’s DOM and CSS by tailing and recording events happening on a web page (such as DOM modification, mouse move, clicks, and input events) along with these events’ timestamps.
Datadog then rebuilds the web page and re-applies the recorded events at the appropriate time in the replay view.
The Session Replay recorder supports all browsers supported by the RUM Browser SDK with the exception of IE11. For more information, see the browser support table.
To reduce Session Replay’s network impact and ensure the Session Replay recorder has minimal overhead on your application’s performance, Datadog compresses the data prior to sending it. Datadog also reduces the load on a browser’s UI thread by delegating most of the CPU-intensive work (such as compression) to a dedicated web worker. The expected network bandwidth impact is less than 100kB/min.
Setup
Learn how to set up and configure Browser Session Replay.
Privacy options
See Privacy Options.
Troubleshooting
Learn how to troubleshoot Browser Session Replay.
Mobile Session Replay
Learn more about Session Replay for Mobile.
Further Reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
