Noise Canceling RUM

par Tim Vereecke, édition 2023

Noisy Real User Monitoring (RUM) data can ruin your day! We introduce a fresh concept called “Human Visible Navigations” (HVN) to tackle this risk; we focus on the experiences you actually care about when talking about the speed of our sites:

Human: We exclude noise coming from bots and synthetic measurements.
Visible: We remove any partial or fully hidden experiences. These tend to be very slow but users don’t see this slowness.
Navigations: We ignore lightning fast back-forward navigations which usually have few optimisation opportunities.

Adopting Human Visible Navigations provides you with these key benefits:

Fewer changes staying below the radar
Fewer data fluctuations
Fewer blindspots when finding bottlenecks
Better correlation with business metrics

This is supported by plenty of real world examples coming from the world’s largest scale modeling site (6M Monthly visits) in combination with aggregated data from the brand new rumarchive.com

Up to 22% of RUM data can be considered noise.

Bad data from a scraper caused a release to be wrongfully rolled back.

With HVN, Real Bounce Rate decreased by 4 percentage points.

Noise skews my actual Time To First Byte by 14%.

Presented by Tim Vereecke Web Performance Architect, Akamai

Tim Vereecke loves speeding up websites and likes to understand the technical and business aspects of WebPerf since 15+ years. He is a Web Performance Architect at Akamai and also runs scalemates.com: the largest (and fastest!) scale modeling website on the planet.