Blog Post

Synthetic + RUM: Better Together

Utilizing Real User Monitoring and Synthetic monitoring solutions is an effective way to cover all of your performance needs.

One of the misperceptions we deal with in some quarters of our market is that real-user measurement is the be-all and end-all of customer experience management. Sure, don’t you want to be looking at real users’ experience of your website rather than the “fake” users that “synthetic” monitoring implies? Won’t that provide the best, most accurate metrics?

The answer to that question is a bit nuanced. Yes, real user measurement does provide valuable insights on how your actual customers navigate and experience your web site and applications that no synthetic monitoring tool can match. But the journey to delivering amazing customer experiences usually starts with synthetic monitoring. Only synthetic monitoring can test your site—every component and dependency of your site—from every location and find performance problems before your actual customers are impacted. With the Internet infrastructure that supports websites more complex and distributed than ever—CDNs, external DNS services, APIs, third-party tags, etc.—this capability is more important than ever.

Our customers typically start with Catchpoint Synthetic Monitoring, then enhance and extend that with Real User Measurement. The two work hand-in-hand to improve your customers’ experience of your site, which enhances your brand and helps you grow revenue. For example, you can simulate step-by-step transactions on your site with Synthetic monitoring and test them again and again to ensure your site is working. You can use RUM to get a better understanding of how customers are interacting with your site, what paths they’re taking, so you know what transactions to test in Synthetic.

RUM and Synthetic work hand-in-hand to deliver a complete view of your customers’ experience of your site and applications. In our new eBook, Monitor All That Matters: How Synthetic + RUM Provide Comprehensive Web Performance Insight, we explore these two technologies in-depth, show how they’re complementary and examine how they can be used together as part of a comprehensive Web performance monitoring strategy.

Download our free eBook Observe All That Matters to learn more.

Synthetic Monitoring
Real User Monitoring
DNS
CDN
API Monitoring
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