Complete Web Monitoring

Could They Do It?

There’s no point in asking what users did if they couldn’t do it in the first place. Answering the fourth question means measuring the health, performance, and availability of the application. As with web analytics, this task has become more complicated in recent years for several reasons.

An application is no longer made from a single component

Your application may rely on plug-ins and browser capabilities. It may pull some parts of a page from a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It’s dependent on stylesheets and JavaScript functioning correctly. It may be delivered to a mobile device. And it may incorporate third-party content such as maps. Even within a single web server there may be various operating systems, services, and virtual machines that make it hard to properly instrument the application.

You’re present on sites you don’t control

You may have a Facebook group or Twitter profile that drives users to your main site. Your site may incorporate third-party SaaS elements: a helpdesk and FAQ service, a portal for job seekers, and an investor information page with stock prices. Even if your own site works well, your users’ experience depends just as much on these external content sources.

Some of your visitors are machines

If you have any kind of API—even an RSS feed—then you need to worry about whether scripts and other websites can correctly access your application. Even if you’re just being indexed by search engines, you need to help those engines navigate your site.

Measuring site health from the end user’s point of view is the discipline of EUEM, which is the logical complement to web analytics. It’s often measured in terms of performance and availability, from both individual and aggregate perspectives.

There are two major approaches to capturing user experience: synthetic testing, which simulates user visits to a site, and real user monitoring (RUM), which watches actual users on the site itself. Together, they provide an accurate picture of whether visitors could do what they tried to do on the site.

RUM data may be collected through many of the same mechanisms as WIA, and some analytics or RUM products offer WIA functionality, such as replay and click overlays.