Real User and Synthetic Monitoring overview (DPS)
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- Overview
- 7-min read
Real User and Synthetic Monitoring in Dynatrace consists of two capability areas that work together to provide complete visibility into how users experience your applications:
- Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures and analyzes actual end‑user interactions across web, mobile, and hybrid applications.
- Synthetic Monitoring uses automated, scripted tests to simulate user behavior and proactively detect performance or availability issues.
This page provides a high-level overview of these capabilities. Visit the capability-specific pages linked below for more detail about consumption and cost control.
Real User Monitoring overview
Real User Monitoring consists of the following three capabilities:
- Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Real User Monitoring with Session Replay
- Real User Monitoring Property
Start with Real User Monitoring, and optionally add session replay and RUM properties according to your needs. Each capability is billed with its own rate card line item.
More information about how these capabilities work together is available at Understand and manage consumption for Real User Monitoring (DPS).
Here's how to select the right RUM capability for your needs:
- Choose Real User Monitoring as the foundation for coverage across all traffic. It helps you to focus on performance trends, errors, and behavior at scale.
- Choose RUM with Session Replay to gain deeper diagnostic insights. It helps you accelerate troubleshooting of UX/UI issues from malformed pages and infinite spinners.
- Use RUM properties when you need business- or action-level metadata to filter, segment, and run queries or dashboards that compare performance and troubleshoot specific users.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Dynatrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures detailed user sessions and frontend performance from web and mobile apps.
It also provides:
- Fine‑grained user events.
- Automatic capture of interactions (clicks, taps, scrolls, inputs).
- Dedicated RUM apps (
Experience Vitals, 
Users & Sessions, and 
Error Inspector).
Real User Monitoring with Session Replay
RUM with Session Replay includes everything in RUM, and adds visual replays of user sessions. Session replay provides a movie-like playback to help you understand UI issues, malformed pages, and user struggles.
Real User Monitoring Property
RUM properties are metadata that enrich captured performance data with user- or session-specific information. This enables powerful queries, segmentation, and aggregations on captured metadata for troubleshooting and analytics.
Any RUM property can be configured for an application.
Dynatrace includes up to 20 properties per application at no additional charge, and bills additional properties per property per session.
Synthetic Monitoring overview
Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring simulates user visits or interactions with your website or app. It consists of three standalone capabilities, which you can use according to your needs:
- Browser Monitor or Clickpath
- HTTP Monitor
- Third-Party Synthetic Integration
Browser Monitor or Clickpath
A browser monitor simulates a user visiting your application using a modern, updated web browser to monitor your application's business-critical workflows. Browser monitors can be configured to run from any Dynatrace public or private locations at frequencies of up to every five minutes, and send alerts when the application becomes inaccessible or when performance degrades significantly. In addition, they can be used to check the availability of internal resources that are inaccessible from outside your network.
The Dynatrace recorder is used to capture an exact sequence of clicks and user inputs, availability, and performance. Alternatively, a defined sequence can be scripted to accomplish the same goal.
HTTP Monitor
Synthetic HTTP monitors can be created to check the availability of resources, such as websites or API endpoints. In addition, they can be used to check the availability of internal resources that are inaccessible from outside your network.
Third-Party Synthetic Integration
The third-party endpoints of the Synthetic API enable the pushing of third-party synthetic data and events to Dynatrace. The API also facilitates adjustments of results which were previously pushed to Dynatrace.