Replay user sessions

Why session replays are important

Session replay provides you with a visual representation of user interactions within your application, presented as either a video or wireframe, and additional meta-information about the session.

You can replay sessions not only to address programming issues and crashes but also to assess the user-friendliness of your application, which helps you to identify and resolve UX challenges. Sessions have a maximum duration of 4 hours.

On mobile devices, Splunk RUM implements session replay functionality through two components:

  • The sessionReplay module, an SDK used by mobile agents to capture user interface and user interactions in replay data. Each mobile agent creates an instance of the replay module and calls its API. See Set up iOS session replay or Set up Android session replay.

    To use the sessionReplay module module, upgrade your Splunk RUM browser agent to v0.23.1 and your Splunk RUM iOS and Android agent to v2.0.0.

  • The replay player, which is integrated into the Splunk RUM user interface. The replay player gets data from the replay module.

Note: You are responsible for using Splunk Observability Cloud in compliance with applicable laws, including but not limited to providing notice to and obtaining any necessary consent from individuals whose data will be collected by Customer’s use of the services.

Use cases

There are many reasons why you might want to replay sessions. Here are a few:

  • Reduce the amount of time support teams take to troubleshoot a problem. By seeing errors from the perspective of an actual user, support teams can quickly identify what happened and take action. Without session replay, support teams could spend a lot of time investigating a variety of possible causes based on an incomplete description of the problem.

  • Introduce fast fixes to your application by focusing on errors that affect users.

  • Improve UX by seeing how users interact with your application and following its workflows. For example, if users aren’t adding promo codes from a targeted ad campaign, you can review the checkout workflow to see if users are unable to identify how to add a promo code.

About the new session replay functionality

Splunk RUM has redesigned the session replay feature and added support for it to mobile applications. This feature consists of two components:

  • The new sessionReplay module is an SDK that contains all of the logic for recording user sessions on browser and mobile applications. You can download this module from a Git repository and add calls to its methods to your application code to start and stop recordings, control the recording quality, and safeguard sensitive data displayed on the screen by the playback module.

  • The redesigned playback widget on the Splunk RUM user interface displays the data captured by the sessionReplay module.

    The playback widget simulates browser tabs, displays JavaScript errors and crashes on the session timeline, and allows you to skip inactive periods in the session.