The eG Approach to Real User Monitoring
eG Enterprise employs a proven, time-tested, ‘JavaScript’ approach to monitor real user transactions to web sites/web applications. This is an ‘agentless approach’ that involves embedding a small JavaScript in every page to be monitored in the target web site/web application. Whenever the browser loads one of these web pages in response to a user request, the script runs and collects the following metrics:
- The page load time;
- Break-up of page load time;
- Count of JavaScript errors (if any);
- Which browser was used to access the page? What is the browser version?
- On what operating system is the browser running?
- From which device the request came in – desktop? mobile phone? or tablet?
Upon metrics collection, the browser sends performance beacons carrying the gathered metrics to a software component called the eG RUM Collector.
Figure 1 : How the eG RUM works
The collector receives the metrics and aggregates then on the basis of the following categories:
- The web site/web application monitored
- URL groups configured for monitoring
- Transaction URL patterns configured for monitoring
- Geographies – i.e., countries, cities, and regions
- Page types – Page, Iframe, AJAX, Virtual Page
- Browsers
- Devices
- Sessions
The remote agent then sorts the aggregated metrics (per category) in the descending order of page load time, and stores the details of only those page views that recorded the highest load time in memory. An eG agent deployed on a remote host, can then be configured to poll the RUM collector at regular intervals to collect the metrics stored in the collector's memory.
The remote agent then compares the (aggregated) metrics downloaded from the eG RUM collector with thresholds to isolate deviations. Both the aggregated metrics and the threshold violations are then reported to the eG manager, which presents the performance and problem information in the eG monitoring console and also stores the same in the eG backend.
