Raygun is an error and performance monitoring software for websites and mobile apps. In the case of websites, you install their JavaScript snippet onto your site, which takes 2 seconds, and now you’ve got monitoring in place. Why? Well now you can watch the performance of your site, not just in a single report of one test, but historical dashboards, tracking that performance over time.
This is Real User Monitoring (RUM)
RUM is regarded as better data than the alternative, which is running synthetic tests. Imagine running a performance test against a headless browser. Useful, but fake. Better is to measure how real people are experiencing your site, which is exactly how Raygun does it.
When you log into Raygun, you’ll see high-level trends as to how your site is performing, with the ability to dig deeper into specific pages and individual user sessions.
Now with Core Web Vitals
Google’s latest user experience metrics, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift are now directly in Raygun:
What I found particularly cool about this is that you don’t have to necessarily pick which pages you want to track CWV on, they’ll be tracked on all pages you have Raygun installed on. I imagine for most sites, that’s all pages, so now you’ll have CWV (and all other performance information) on every page of your site. So rather than picking-and-choosing a handful of pages to test, and risking there being outlier pages that behave slowly, you’ve got full coverage.
Filter to What You Need
You’re going to have a lot of data with Raygun, and that’s a very good thing. But that doesn’t mean it has to be overwhelming or you can’t find exactly what you need. Say you’ve heard from a user that the site is behaving slowly for them in Firefox, you can filter for Firefox and look into that.
Take Action
What makes Raygun really useful is having all of the information you need to take action, with access to waterfall timelines, session information, and instance level diagnostics. This means you don’t just monitor what your CWV scores are, you can actively improve them.
Crash Reporting
We’ve mostly talked about performance reporting here, but note that Raygun is an error reporting tool as well. That is significant, as it means you don’t need to reach for a separate service for that vital need. You get your performance and crash reporting information in the same place.
Find issues. Fix issues. Watch your site improve. After your free trial, pricing starts at just $8/month for plans that have Real User Monitoring with CWV.
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