Synthetic or RUM: Which tech do you use to gauge website performance?
Adrian Abrate
Once your company attracts a certain level of online traffic it will become important to start monitoring and tracking the performance of your customers experience on your site. This means more than just referencing Google Analytics data such as bounce rates, traffic sources and time on site metrics.
Ideally you want to track and measure the performance of your site as your customer experiences it.
Your customers live where the action happens, outside of your firewall.
If you have an internal monitoring system (for example Tivoli) then you are already monitoring elements of your infrastructure and have an appreciation for maximising site up-time and being alerted when problems begin to manifest.
Internal monitoring is vital however it won't alert you to a variety of performance problems including:
- External name resolution problems
- On-page third party object performance
- CDN / Load Balancer issues
- Object level performance visibility
- Usability problems
So what are the best external monitoring technologies for your company website?
There are currently two technologies for external website monitoring in Australia today: Synthetic and Real User Monitoring (RUM).
Synthetic monitoring
Synthetic website monitoring is the best way for any website to view performance data over time as well as being alerted to external issues as they occur. A comprehensive synthetic monitoring solution will provide you with visibility to performance data at the infrastructure, application and object level of your deployment.
Synthetic Monitoring is implemented by a third-party application which scans your website at specific intervals. Static web pages can be monitored as well as the transaction paths that typical users travel; for example, logging on to the site, adding a product to a shopping cart and then clicking through to the checkout. External visibility to performance along a transaction path is important to ensure a positive customer experience.
Real User Monitoring.
RUM allows you to view website performance statistics based on actual 'real' user visits. This gives you access to accurate external performance issues that your users experience. RUM allows you to more accurately make strategic decisions on placement of CDN's, bandwidth increases etc.
Real user monitoring is implemented in one of two ways. Most commonly a small snippet of JavaScript code is inserted into site headers. The other way is to deploy a tracking server into your infrastructure behind your firewall.
Ideally a combination of both Synthetic website monitoring and RUM should be used to externally monitor your organisation. This will provide visibility to infrastructure and performance degradation, accurate alerting via Synthetic monitoring as well as visibility to real customer experience through Real User monitoring.
There are several suppliers on the market in Australia that provide these services. Comprehensive monitoring solutions use local testing infrastructure and multiple ISPs — removing false alerts being raised by a single ISP issue — for testing.
Adrian Abrate is a consultant with NCC Group Australia. Providing total information assurance solutions for your business. NCC provides freedom from doubt that business critical information, data, websites, applications and infrastructure are available, protected and operating as they should be at all times.