What does Real User Monitoring (RUM) capture?

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is designed to capture the actual experiences of end-users interacting with web applications and services. It tracks and analyzes various metrics based on the real-time usage data gathered from users, including page load times, transaction times, and user interactions. This data provides insights into how users experience the application, including the geographical distribution of the users, the devices they are using, and how they navigate through the application.

By focusing on actual user interactions, RUM helps organizations identify performance issues and understand how user engagement is affected by different factors. This direct measurement is critical for making informed decisions to improve application performance, optimize user experiences, and drive user satisfaction.

The other options do not align with the specific purpose of RUM. For instance, service availability metrics pertain to the uptime and operational reliability rather than user experience. Traffic data from synthetic users relates to artificially simulated user interactions that are used for testing rather than capturing genuine usage patterns. Lastly, system performance on server levels pertains to the underlying infrastructure performance and does not capture the end-user perspective, which is the primary focus of RUM.