Noise Canceling RUM — Tim Vereecke — We Love Speed 2023
Channel: We Love Speed
Date: 2023-05-15

RUM data can be noisy. Human Visible Navigations (HVN) is a new concept to tackle this risk!

    Noisy Real User Monitoring (RUM) data can ruin your day!

    We introduce a fresh concept called "Human Visible Navigations" (HVN) to tackle this risk; we focus on the experiences you actually care about when talking about the speed of our sites:

    - Human: We exclude noise coming from bots and synthetic measurements.

    - Visible: We remove any partial or fully hidden experiences. These tend to be very slow but users don’t see this slowness.

    - Navigations: We ignore lightning fast back-forward navigations which usually have few optimisation opportunities.


    Adopting Human Visible Navigations provides you with these key benefits:

    - Fewer changes staying below the radar

    - Fewer data fluctuations

    - Fewer blindspots when finding bottlenecks

    - Better correlation with business metrics


    This is supported by plenty of real world examples coming from the world's largest scale modeling site (6M Monthly visits) in combination with aggregated data from the brand new rumarchive.com 

    - Up to 22% of RUM data can be considered noise.


    - Bad data from a scraper caused a release to be wrongfully rolled back.


    - With HVN, Real Bounce Rate decreased by 4 percentage points.


    - Noise skews my actual Time To First Byte by 14%.