Datadog has turned its teeth on its customers’ website visitors, adding Real User Monitoring – or RUM – to its menu of services.

Or, put another way, companies can get a sharper focus on customer or user activity at the front end and use that to, shall we say, prompt developers to do better.

“RUM provides yet another layer of visibility to help you understand the health and performance of your services—and how they align with your business objectives,” the firm said.

Getting RUM up and running requires downloading the appropriate SDK and adding it to the application you want to monitor. 

“Datadog automatically organizes your user data into page views (which show you details of each page visit) and sessions (which group all the successive page views by a single user in a single visit),” the firm said. These then form a launchpad to examine a single user’s entire journey, and match that against application performance.

A RUM dashboard tracks page views, load times, errors, and information about users’ browsers and devices. Customers have the option to track 350 technologies, add custom metrics, and slice and dice by metrics such as geography

Ultimately, Datadog says, “RUM allows you to combine real user analytics with performance data so that you can help your engineering team maximize every sprint.”

Of course, this is going to cost, with pricing starting at $15 per 10,000 sessions per month billed annually, or $21.60 if you consuming it on an ad hoc basis. Which will be on top of your other Datadog services, such as infrastructure monitoring, or Synthetics.