Introduction to Splunk RUM

Learn more about how Splunk Real Using Monitoring (RUM) can help you monitor front-end user experience of applications, identify errors, and troubleshoot long resource response times.

With Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can gain insight about the performance and health of the front-end user experience of your application. Splunk RUM offers 2 solutions:

Product

Description

Splunk RUM for Browser

Splunk RUM for Browser collects performance metrics, web vitals, errors, and other forms of data for every user session to enable you to detect and troubleshoot problems in your application. For a complete view of your application from browser to back-end, integrate with Splunk APM.

Splunk RUM for Mobile

Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) for Mobile provides visibility into every user session of your native iOS and Android mobile applications by equipping you with comprehensive performance monitoring, directed troubleshooting, and full-stack observability.

To keep up to date with changes in RUM, see the Splunk Observability Cloud release notes.

What can I do with Splunk RUM?

Do this

Link to documentation

Learn how to identify errors and other problems like long resource response times in your browser spans.

Scenario: Investigate errors in your browser spans

Create custom events to capture meaningful metrics about customer journeys and user behavior on your site.

Create custom events

Experiment with the demo applications for Splunk RUM for Mobile

Experiment with the demo applications for Splunk RUM for Mobile

If you want to monitor your application from browser to back-end, then integrate Splunk RUM with Splunk APM. When you integrate Splunk RUM for Browser with Splunk APM, you start sending server timing metrics to RUM along with the back-end trace ID that was generated.

If a span in Splunk RUM has an associated back-end span, an APM link appears next to the span in the waterfall view and opens the span details page in Splunk APM.

By default, the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry already sends the Server-Timing header. The header links spans from the browser with back-end spans and traces.

Splunk RUM for Browser uses the server-timing header response times to associate the RUM span with the corresponding APM trace. The APM environment variable for controlling the Server-Timing header is SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true. Set SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true

Splunk RUM for Browser uses the server-timing header response times to associate the RUM span with the corresponding APM trace. The APM environment variable for controlling the Server-Timing header is SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true. Set SPLUNK_TRACE_RESPONSE_HEADER_ENABLED=true to link to Splunk APM.

For more information on Splunk APM, see Monitor applications with Splunk APM.

Get data in

To start instrumenting your application with Splunk RUM, see Set up Splunk RUM for mobile and browser applications.