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Improving digital experienceswith measurements that matter
WHITE PAPER
Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance
2Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Why measure performance?
Online users won’t wait around for a site to respond in today’s rapidly
moving digital world. More than half of mobile site visits end if a page
takes longer than three seconds to load, according to research from
Google. With only a few seconds to make a good impression, that
leaves little room for error.
There are many factors that contribute to the digital experience. Some
are easy to detect and fix, while others are intermittent and elusive. To
understand the impact of performance on user experience, you need
to measure it from many angles. No single monitoring solution can
tell you everything about your online performance, but with the right
combination of measurements, you’ll be able to deliver the rich and
responsive experiences today’s users have come to expect on all of
their devices, anywhere.
Stay ahead of the curveJust like the digital experiences they measure, your performance
monitoring tools should never be static. With the well-established
relationship between fast web pages and better business results,
new insights can help you continually improve online performance
to exceed growing user expectations.
From identifying the gap between when a page looks ready and when it responds, to automatically
finding and fixing slow-downs, new capabilities help you fine-tune performance like never before.
Performance monitoring can now deliver deep insights into real user experience and business
impact, increase speed and reduce errors in DevOps, and effortlessly enhance page quality
with adaptive and automatic improvements. But to take advantage of these benefits, you need a
complete view of online performance.
End-to-end performance monitoringFor an accurate assessment of how your websites and apps perform, you must measure them end
to end. Back-end monitoring ensures the systems under your control are in top shape. Front-end
monitoring provides insight on user experience, allowing you to troubleshoot performance problems
before they impact real users, as well as when they do.
All monitoring solutions are the same.
While many solutions tout end-to-end monitoring, they are likely to miss hard-to-find front-end problems without specialized traditional and perceived RUM metrics and synthetic monitoring.
PERFORMANCE MONITORINGMYTHS#1
3Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Back-End Time
Combining strengths of back-end and front-end synthetic and real user performance
monitoring solutions will provide the most accurate view of user experience.
The leading methods for measuring web performance include:
• Application performance management (APM)
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring (RUM)
Each of these methods provides a valuable piece of the performance puzzle. Depending on which you
use, you might only have a partial view of online performance. Put them together, and you’ll gain the
insight you need to engage and delight users, keeping pace with their ever-changing digital lifestyles.
Server Network Browser User
Network Time Page Load Time Interactivity
+ Do you really know when the page is ready for use?
+ Are deferred elements blocking interactivity?
+ Will CPU limitations impact mobile performance?
Back End
APM
Traditional RUM
RUM with Perceived Performance
Back-End Time
4Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Application performance management (APM) Keep back-end systems running smoothly
The first step to understanding online performance is to look inside. APM allows you to monitor the
back end of application performance — server, network, software, and storage details. APM can help
you identify technical problems causing delays and errors, such as a broken piece of code, an offline
server, a load balancer misconfiguration, or bandwidth constraints.
APM allows you to make sure that the software you push out to the web is ready to perform — with the
right hardware to back it up — and keeps your websites and applications in good condition. If you’re
doing business online, you’re probably already putting APM into practice. APM is critical for monitoring
back-end systems and can give you some insight on front-end performance, too — but there’s more
work to be done to vie for users in today’s competitive online environment.
Synthetic monitoring Simulate, compare, and tune performance
You’ve got the back end monitored and optimized, but front-end issues can be more difficult to find
and fix. Synthetic monitoring replicates user actions under simulated conditions, providing a baseline
for online performance and delivering regular health checks by measuring response and load times, as
well as page assets and size. Commonly used for measuring both website availability and the service
level agreements (SLAs) of key technology partners, synthetic monitoring can also be used to check for
and alert you to outages.
Because you can set up synthetic monitoring for any publicly accessible website, it serves as a useful
tool to benchmark your site against competitors or previous versions of your own site. Additionally, you
can use synthetic monitoring to simulate traffic to test pages or critical user funnels in pre-production
or staging environments. This allows you to identify potential slowdowns before they impact users
and quickly analyze, diagnose, and fix problems that you find in production. Pre-production testing
and A/B testing deliver important intelligence about performance changes and are effective ways to
incorporate performance analysis into your DevOps pipeline.
5Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
However, performance snapshots from synthetic monitoring are periodic and limited to the schedule
you set and scripts you develop. While synthetic monitoring is great for catching persistent or known
problems, it isn’t much help for intermittent or unexpected issues. Plus, you can’t measure what you
don’t know.
Real user monitoring (RUM) Understanding real user experiences
While synthetic testing provides snippets of front-end performance data, RUM constantly
monitors traffic moving through your pages. Delivering a broad view of real user experiences,
RUM detects incidents that might occur outside of synthetic monitoring periods or for activities
you can’t anticipate.
Traditional RUM metrics include user paths and time spent on each page, as well as where and how
users access content — on a mixture of devices, browsers, locations, and networks. This information
helps you prioritize optimizations, because your slowest page might not be the most important.
RUM also identifies how first- and third-party scripts affect page load, user experience, and
business results.
RUM allows you to define key performance indicator (KPI) thresholds so you can measure and
receive alerts against them. These baseline performance metrics help you not only detect when
your site is down, but also when a problem is affecting business objectives, or just deviates from
normal performance or traffic levels. These insights extend all the way down to the resource level
to help you determine the impact of a single script, a web font, or an image on your conversion
rate and revenue— and what you gain by accelerating or removing it.
Once you understand real user behavior on your site, you can refine synthetic monitoring to be
more effective. RUM data helps you adjust synthetic monitoring to create more realistic user paths,
volumes, and actions. Unlike synthetic testing, RUM reflects only your online properties, with no
diagnostics or performance optimization. That’s why these two methods of front-end monitoring
make a perfect pair.
6Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Perceived performance RUM A new dimension of user experience
With the growing popularity of mobile devices, and the shrinking margin of error for online
experiences (remember the three-second rule), a new dimension of user experience has emerged.
The latest RUM innovation goes beyond reporting traditional page timing milestones to include
perceived user experience metrics.
Perceived user experience — the moment when users expect to interact with your page — is the
magic mirror for identifying the experiences your customers are actually having. These metrics
detect how visual rendering and interactivity influence behavior. Instead of just measuring the time
it takes for a page to load, time-to-visually-ready indicates when the page looks fully loaded to the
user (even if it isn’t). If there’s a gap here, your site might be inducing click rage — especially true
for mobile, where consumers have twice as many interactions with brands than anywhere else,
according to Google research.
Actual user interaction (key, click, scroll)
Application is actually ready
Application looks ready
Page load time What you’ve been optimizing for
Customer experience focus Is there a gap in your understanding of performance?
Perceived performance metrics help you close the gap between when a page looks
complete (orange) and when it is responsive (light blue) to improve user experiences.
7Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Google benchmarks also show as the number of elements — text,
titles, images — on a page goes from 400 to 6,000, the probability
of conversion drops 95%. Now, RUM page construction metrics
provide insight on how the elements that make up the page
impact business results. Page load time is a sum of its parts, and
complexity can strain the rendering of pages on devices. Combat
page complexity and weight issues without stripping the most
compelling interactive features by understanding exactly which
elements bog down the page, and optimizing or removing them.
Finally, delivery strategy is a key component in online performance.
To make the most of your content delivery network (CDN) — the go-to
solution for accelerating performance — delivery or “middle mile” RUM
metrics allow you to measure how your content is being distributed to
users. These new metrics open up the CDN black box to evaluate and
adjust optimization strategies.
Putting it all together You’ve got the measurements — now take action
Once you have all the right measurements using APM, synthetic
monitoring, and RUM with traditional as well as perceived
performance metrics, you need to make that data actionable. Let’s
focus on front-end monitoring since 80% to 90% of end-user response
time is spent there, according to the Performance Golden Rule.
Using RUM data as a starting point, you’ll be able to determine
the revenue opportunities for improved performance. Advanced
RUM dashboards help you calculate what you stand to gain from
each performance optimization through “what if” scenarios. If you
speed up a page or remove an element, what will it do to revenue?
This capability allows you to understand, justify, and communicate
performance priorities by quantifying recommendations, making it
easier for business decision-makers to understand and support.
By creating a list of fixes based on the best return on investment (ROI),
you can prioritize where to start making changes. And don’t neglect
evaluating the impact of third-party scripts — slow-downs or errors
could negate their value by driving away users.
Synthetic monitoring already measures user performance.
Yes, but it only simulates user performance. For insight into how real users are experiencing your site, and to design more accurate synthetic measurements, you need to supplement synthetic with RUM.
PERFORMANCE MONITORINGMYTHS#2
From perceived experience metrics, you can see when users expect
a page to be interactive and when it is responsive. Are JavaScript
deferrals or CPU limitations causing a delay between when the
page looks ready and when it actually is ready? For example, if your
JavaScript is too heavy, your page might still be loading when the
action button looks ready to press — users try, but can’t interact with
your site. By closing this gap, you will engage users more quickly and
avoid unnecessary frustration.
Once you’ve fixed the performance problems deemed most critical,
you should simulate traffic to confirm that the changes worked.
Synthetic monitoring allows you to observe business-critical flows
and benchmark other sites to check for competitive performance.
You can maintain those levels by creating guardrails for regressions
— if responsiveness slips below a certain threshold, address it
quickly before it affects users. With RUM and synthetic monitoring
together, you can also design intelligent alerts that notify you not
only of an outage, but also if you’re missing KPIs — helping you
resolve problems that impact your business, while minimizing
distractions from false positives.
User experience lifecycle management
• Which pages to monitor • What variables to test • How fast pages should be • What to prioritize for optimization • Performance enhancement business outcome
• Which pages to optimize • How to fix performance problems • Performance during DevOps process • Contrast to previous versions of competition • Website availability
Used together, RUM and synthetic monitoring allow you to find and fix front-end
performance problems to deliver superior user experiences.
I just need the data to identify performance issues.
Data alone can’t provide actionable guidance to quickly find and fix bottlenecks. A RUM tool surfaces insight from all of your online traffic to help you discover and resolve performance problems quickly.
PERFORMANCE MONITORINGMYTHS#3
mPulse tells you
Rigor tells you
9Gaining a Complete View of Online Performance: Improving digital experiences with measurements that matter
Continuous digital performance management Find and fix performance slowdowns
Monitoring performance is the first step in an ongoing process of managing user experience. Continuous
digital performance management finds and fixes problems to improve experiences and maximize online
revenue. With a complete digital performance management offering, Akamai delivers real user insight to
prioritize where to act, integrated tools to optimize performance, and scalable testing to simulate realistic
scenarios for the confidence that your applications will meet user expectations.
Identify slowdowns
A combination of APM, synthetic, and real user monitoring will identify and remove barriers to
delivering superior digital experiences. Since the front end is responsible for the majority of user
response time, layering specialized front-end monitoring capabilities on top of APM delivers a
complete picture of online performance.
Through a partnership with Rigor, Akamai offers a complete front-end monitoring solution. Rigor
synthetic provides step-by-step guidance to resolve performance bottlenecks throughout a modern
DevOps pipeline. Rigor uses in-browser simulations to measure digital performance from a user
perspective. Because Rigor synthetic monitoring is external, you can leverage its monitoring networks
to test and benchmark against other sites.
According to HTTP Archive, 40% of websites
contain between 75% and 99% third-party content.
These scripts are a part of your web experience
that is outside of your direct control. Third parties
provide important services such as analytics,
personalization, social engagement, or advertising
revenue, but how do you manage the potentially
negative impacts of third-party scripts should they
become slow or unresponsive?
Akamai’s mPulse allows you to see what’s
happening across all scripts, on all pages, all of the
time, and model scenarios to preview the impact
of a script on page load and conversion. With
these insights, you can determine if the benefits
of a third party exceed any potential performance
hit and determine if a third-party slowdown is
infrequent or persistent.
Akamai’s Script Manager uses RUM data for
insight into slow or unresponsive JavaScript.
Armed with this data, Script Manager
automatically takes action to block or defer
JavaScript execution so that it won’t interrupt
user experiences.
SCRIPT MANAGEMENT
Manage the impact of what you can’t control
Determinerevenueopportunity for performance
Prioritize focus areas that provide the best ROI
P L A N C O N T I N U O U S LY M O N I T O R , D I A G N O S E , O P T I M I Z E
Benchmark against thecompetition
Establish your performance baseline
Protect against performance regression in DevOps
Be alerted to performance issues in real time
V A L I D AT E
Quantify the ROI of your performance investments
R I G O R
m P U L S Em P U L S E
Akamai mPulse RUM provides advanced insights
into how performance is impacting actual user
experiences and conversions. Backed by the
world’s largest and most reliable cloud delivery
platform, mPulse provides perceived user
experience, page construction, and CDN metrics,
as well as integration with powerful performance
optimization capabilities. For example, mPulse can
not only identify problematic third-party scripts,
but Akamai can also automatically track and defer
scripts that exceed performance thresholds.
Optimize performance Akamai optimizations help overcome limitations
in network connections, third-party services, and
underperforming devices. The Akamai Intelligent
Edge Platform caches assets at the edge to
enable personalized experiences without server
calls taxing back-end infrastructure — providing
uninterrupted availability, even during an outage.
Akamai Ion Adaptive Acceleration uses real user
data to speed up web and mobile experiences
automatically — preemptively pushing resources
or connecting to third parties, before they are
requested by the browser.
Ion’s advanced mobile web optimization routines
accelerate page rendering by analyzing devices
and expediting requests for resources contained in
device viewports, increasing the download speed
of the visible page.
Akamai’s technology responds to users as
quickly as possible — allowing the browser to
download important resources such as JavaScript,
Cascading Style Sheets, and key images. To
engage users more quickly, Akamai Image
Manager automatically adjusts image size, quality,
and format.
Validate improvements
Once performance is optimized, it’s critical
to validate it. Simulating user traffic and
monitoring real user experiences will verify
if optimizations are working. For ongoing
quality control, you can automate optimization
with mPulse and integrate testing into
continuous integration processes with Rigor.
To prepare for peaks, Akamai CloudTest load
testing allows you to test at scale.
mPulse and Rigor help you plan, optimize, and validate performance for user
experience lifecycle management.
Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world’s largest companies. Akamai’s intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps, and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai’s portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access, and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics, and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world’s top brands trust Akamai, visit akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter. You can find our global contact information at akamai.com/locations. Published 07/19.
Measure what matters todayIn today’s fast-paced marketplace, you must capture opportunities before they disappear.
The sooner you identify slowdowns and errors, the more quickly you can deliver the engaging digital
experiences users demand — and reap the rewards for your business.
To always improve digital experience and gain a competitive edge, you must continuously manage
digital performance with end-to-end performance monitoring. If you aren’t integrating the latest RUM
insights into your performance monitoring strategy, try Akamai mPulse today at Akamai.com/trympulse
to start gathering measurements that matter.
Monitor Real User Performance Ready to get a complete view of online performance?
Visit Akamai.com/trympulse to start gathering measurements that matter.
Learn More