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    Real User Monitoring Getting Started
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    Contents

    Real User Monitoring Getting Started

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    Article summary

    What is RUM?

    Retrace’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) shows you when your customers are having a poor experience and points your UI engineers to where it can be fixed. RUM data that gets collected for your app will show you:

    • Page load times that are dissected into Network Time, DOM Loading, and Page Rendering components so you can pinpoint the exact stage during page load where your bottlenecks are occurring.
    • Client-side traces that are merged with their server-side counterpart so you get a complete slice of the entire request and response for your application.
    Release Candidate
    Please note that this is the release candidate version of the product. Should you encounter any bugs, lack of functionality or other problems, please let us know immediately.

    Enabling RUM for your Account

    Note:

    RUM is currently in a Release Candidate preview. If you don't see RUM available in your Settings menu please contact product@stackify.com.

    To enable RUM in your Retrace account, navigate to the Settings > RUM and toggle RUM on. This will generate a unique RETRACE_RUM_KEY tied to your account that you will need to add to your hosts monitored by the Retrace Agent as an environment variable.
    Real-User Monitoring Configuration.png

    Installing the Stackify Agent

    Make sure your agents are up to date!

    RUM is supported in the 4.32 or later version of the Windows Agent and the 2.31 version of the Linux Agent.

    Along with enabling RUM in your Retrace account, you will also need to install the Stackify Agent on the server(s) hosting your applications and enable the profiler. If you haven't already installed the agent, follow the Agent Installation Guide that corresponds to your specific setup.

    Installing the agent and the APM profiler on your server will allow for traces to be stitched together for server-side and client side requests, painting a more complete picture around your application's health and performance.

    Implementing the Code Script

    Most languages support *Automatic or Manual injection of the RUM script. See more information for what your language supports here:

    Best Practices

    If configuring for Manual injection...

    ...you will want to place the script generation code as close to the opening <head> tag as possible for every HTML page you want to gather data for in your application. Placing the script in the head tag before all other scripts will ensure more accurate timings of the UI components while not impacting page performance.

    See the documentation listed above for each language for how to call the API and insert the code into the page and configure the RUM Key for use by your application.

    Viewing RUM Data

    Once the following steps have been taken to set up RUM for your apps, data will be reported in the corresponding App Dashboard. To see more information related to what RUM data is presented in the App Dashboard, see the Viewing RUM Data in Retrace help doc.

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