Users & Sessions
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Users & Sessions will help you understand how users interact with your web and mobile applications.
This app provides a detailed session-level analysis, so you can:
- Investigate individual user journeys
- Identify problematic sessions
- Understand user behavior patterns across web and mobile applications
Note: Users & Sessions is currently in the preview phase and is available for participants of the RUM on Grail preview. For details, see New Real User Monitoring Experience (preview).
Prerequisites
- Join the New RUM Experience preview.
- Enable New RUM Experience.
For more information, see Web frontends and Mobile frontends.
Get started
A user session—"visit," "journey," or "clickpath"—is an interaction between an individual user's device and your application. It encompasses a sequence of events triggered by the same user in a limited period.
Users & Sessions lets you discover and explore sessions of interest through a filtering system and an intuitive visual session presentation. It has the following main components:
- Overview: your landing page for Users & Sessions
- Sessions: lists sessions within the selected timeframe and matching filtering options
- Session Viewer: visualizes one session
Overview page
When you go to Users & Sessions, you land on the Overview page by default. From there, you can:
- Go to Sessions
- Open relevant ready-made dashboards and notebooks.
Sessions table
To view the Sessions table, select the Sessions tab.
Each row of the table is a sessions record that contains:
- Unique session identifier.
- Session start time.
- Frontend application that was accessed.
- User tag (if any was assigned).
- Geographic location from which a user accessed your application.
- Replay availability indicator, which indicates whether the Session Replay data is available for the session.
- Browser used during the session (for web applications).
What you can do to the Sessions table:
- Change the timeframe in the upper-right corner of the table. The default is Last 2 hours.
- Filter the sessions in the table.
- Select the columns to display in the table.
- Search for specific sessions.
- Turn on line wrap.
- Turn off line wrap.
- Refresh the table.
- >
Pin to dashboard pins the table to a dashboard. - > Download table exports the table to CSV file.
Only the sessions closed at least one hour ago are displayed. Open sessions, and sessions that closed within the hour and are still being processed, aren't displayed.
View individual sessions
To view details of a session, select the session in the Sessions table by its ID. The session details page offers comprehensive information about what happened during the session, including:
- Session details
- List of events
- Timeline
Session details
The session details are displayed at the top of the view. They include:
- Session start time
- Session duration
- Number of accessed frontends
- Browser name and version (for web sessions)
- Operating system
Additional contextual information may include a geographic location, device type, and session properties.
Events
In the Events table, you can see the events that happened during the session. Each row of the table is an event record that contains the event type, time, view (page or view where the event happened), description, load time, and tab. To view an event's details, select the event in the table. The details are displayed right to the table.
What you can do to the Events table:
- Filter the events in the table
- Select the columns to display in the table
- Search for specific events
- Turn on line wrap
- Turn off line wrap
- Download the table to a CSV file
There are the following event types:
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Navigation—encompasses user navigation events such as page loads and transitions between URLs. It breaks down timings for key performance metrics, including DNS lookup, connection establishment, request, and DOM processing. Navigation attributes like origin and destination URLs are also displayed, helping you understand user activity flows within the application.
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User Interactions—captures and categorizes user actions such as clicks, touches, scrolls, key presses, text input, drag-and-drop, and zoom events. For each interaction,
Users & Sessions shows details such as a web UI element's name, tag, XPath, and the mouse pointer position, allowing precise tracking of how users engage with the application. -
Errors—identifies issues such as exceptions, failed requests, and Content Security Policy (CSP) violations. For each error,
Users & Sessions shows details such as error ID, type, message, and severity (for example, fatal or non-fatal). For CSP violations, additional details, for example, blocked URI, referrer, and original policy are provided to aid in debugging and resolution. -
Requests—logs all network requests made by the application, including media, documents, API calls, and binary files. For each request,
Users & Sessions shows details such as HTTP status code, request method, URL, response time, and file type. This information is essential for diagnosing network-related issues and understanding data exchanges between the application and servers. -
Properties and Others—aggregates metadata related to the user's environment and session. It includes information such as browser details (user agent, version, screen dimensions), device characteristics (battery level, orientation), client IP, and ISP. This data helps you analyze sessions and understand the conditions under which events occurred.
Timeline
The timeline at the bottom of the view is a graphical representation of all events during the session. It provides insights into which events happened at which points in time. Use Zoom to see the events for a specific period of time. Zoom may be particularly useful for long sessions where you want to examine a specific sequence of events in detail.
The IP address, User Tag, Geolocation Latitude, and Geolocation Longitude fields are hidden by default in the Sessions and Events tables. You need special permission to view them. For details, see Permissions in Grail.
Related topics
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For details about New Real User Monitoring Experience, see New RUM Experience.
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For details about other New RUM Experience apps, see Experience Vitals and Error Inspector.
Use cases
Let's take a look at the following use cases.
Troubleshooting
Suppose your web application experiences intermittent JavaScript exceptions on the dashboard page, but only for users accessing it through Chrome version 120. Error logs show exception codes, but your team can't reproduce the issue locally.
With Users & Sessions, you can:
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Filter affected sessions in the Sessions table by the browser name (Chrome), browser version (120), and error count.
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Examine the errors in the session details view to identify error types, error severity, and associated web UI elements via XPath.
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In the session details view, see the events timeline and open the Request tab when viewing an error’s details. This helps you identify correlations between errors and failed API calls.
Result: The incompatible third-party script is identified and updated, eliminating the exceptions without requiring manual reproduction.
Complaint resolution
Suppose a customer claims they were charged twice for the same order after selecting Complete Purchase multiple times due to perceived page unresponsiveness. The payment logs show only one transaction.
With Users & Sessions, you can:
- Filter affected sessions in the Sessions table by a user tag or session ID.
- Review events of the User interaction type in the session details view to verify the exact number of button clicks and their timing.
- Review events of the Navigation type in the session details view to confirm only one payment request was processed.
Result: a single transaction is validated with specific session evidence, and the underlying page performance issue is identified for optimization.
Performance analysis
Suppose your RUM dashboard shows that page load times for your product catalog page exceeds five seconds for 15% of users. However, aggregate metrics don't explain why this subset is affected.
With Users & Sessions, you can:
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In the Sessions table, filter sessions by duration and frontend, and then sort them by navigation count to identify the longest-loading sessions.
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Review events of the Navigation type in the session details view to examine timing metrics, including domain lookup, connection time, request duration, and DOM processing.
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Filter sessions in the Sessions table by browser name, browser window width, and location to identify correlations with specific browsers, screen sizes, or geographic regions.
Result: DOM processing bottlenecks for specific browser window sizes are identified. This allows you to address issues like slow loading.
Product development
Suppose your product team redesigns the checkout flow and needs data-driven insights about how users currently navigate through it, including places where users hesitate, and which steps cause confusion.
With Users & Sessions, you can:
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In the Sessions table, filter sessions that contain checkout-related pages and analyze the user interaction count to identify sessions with unusually high activity that may indicate confusion.
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Review events of the User interaction type in the session details view to identify patterns in clicks, scrolls, and text inputs. This allows you to identify which web UI elements are used the most.
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Check the events timeline in the session details view to identify places where users spend the most time or where drop-offs occur.
Result: Specific web UI friction points are identified, such as excessive scrolling in compact viewports and confusion with the form fields. This provides you with ideas for data-driven redesign with improved layout and contextual help.
Users & Sessions