What is Real User Monitoring?

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a powerful analytics feature in smoxy that collects and analyzes real performance data from your actual website visitors. Unlike synthetic monitoring that simulates user visits, RUM captures genuine user experiences as they interact with your website in the real world.

Why Real User Monitoring Matters

Your website's performance directly impacts user satisfaction, conversion rates, and search engine rankings. RUM helps you understand how your site performs for real users across different:

  • Devices: Desktop, mobile, and tablet users may experience your site differently

  • Locations: Geographic distribution affects loading times due to network latency

  • Network conditions: Users on fast fiber connections vs. mobile networks see vastly different performance

  • Browsers: Different rendering engines can impact page load times

With Real User Monitoring, you get visibility into actual user experiences, enabling you to:

✅ Identify performance bottlenecks before they impact conversions ✅ Track Core Web Vitals that affect your Google search rankings ✅ Monitor trends over time to catch regressions early ✅ Understand geographic performance to optimize CDN and server locations ✅ Make data-driven decisions about performance optimizations

Core Web Vitals Explained

Google uses Core Web Vitals as ranking factors for search results. RUM automatically tracks these critical metrics:

Metric
What It Measures
Good
Needs Improvement
Poor

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Loading performance - when the largest content element becomes visible

≤ 2.5s

2.5s - 4.0s

> 4.0s

INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

Responsiveness - how quickly the page responds to user interactions

≤ 200ms

200ms - 500ms

> 500ms

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Visual stability - how much content shifts unexpectedly during load

≤ 0.1

0.1 - 0.25

> 0.25

Additional Performance Metrics

Beyond Core Web Vitals, smoxy RUM collects comprehensive performance data:

  • TTFB (Time to First Byte): Server response time

  • FCP (First Contentful Paint): When the first content appears

  • TBT (Total Blocking Time): How long the page is unresponsive

  • Page Load Time: Complete page loading duration

  • Total Byte Weight: Size of all resources loaded

  • DNS Lookup Time: Time to resolve domain names

  • Connection Time: Time to establish server connection

  • SSL Time: Time for SSL/TLS handshake

How Real User Monitoring Works in smoxy

  1. Lightweight Tracking: A small JavaScript snippet is added to your website

  2. Non-Intrusive Collection: Data is collected asynchronously without affecting page performance

  3. Privacy-Focused: No personal user data is collected - only performance metrics

  4. Automatic Sampling: Intelligent sampling ensures you capture representative data without overhead

  5. Instant Analytics: View your data in real-time through the smoxy dashboard

  6. Long-Term Storage: Data is retained for up to 2 years for trend analysis

What Makes smoxy RUM Special

smoxy's Real User Monitoring goes beyond basic analytics:

🔓 Open Source Dashboard: Unlike other RUM providers, smoxy provides an open source Grafana dashboard that you can customize and host yourself. Your data, your way.

🌍 Geographic Insights: See performance broken down by country and region

📊 API Access: Full API access to your RUM data for custom integrations

💰 No Per-Event Pricing: RUM is included with your smoxy account - no surprise bills based on traffic

Ready to Get Started?

Real User Monitoring helps you understand your website's real-world performance and make informed decisions about optimization.

👉 Next Step: Setting Up Real User Monitoring - Learn how to enable RUM for your domains in just a few minutes.

Last updated

Was this helpful?