Frontend Observability with Real User Monitoring (RUM)

groundcover has rapidly gained market recognition as the disruptive solution for application and infrastructure observability. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re expanding our scope to the client side, bringing eBPF and BYOC to frontend observability, through a new Real User Monitoring (RUM) capability. 

What does it all mean? It’s no less than a total game changer. The ability to leverage groundcover’s unique Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model, which allows you to monitor your environments without streaming any of your data to a third-party cloud, offers complete privacy to your users’ data. In addition, the revolutionary capabilities of our backend observability are now merged into a single platform with frontend observability, facilitating an end-to-end correlation and visibility over the entire experience, helping you enhance user experience and troubleshoot issues even faster than before!

Why did groundcover expand to this new observability frontier?

Frontend teams often have to rely on a toolstack that works in silo from backend monitoring tools. This split-brain approach means context is often fragmented across tools. Now, groundcover’s RUM capability adds an additional pillar of observability to groundcover by bringing real user experience data from the browser into the same fold as your backend telemetry. In other words, groundcover is now a full-stack observability platform – correlating what’s happening in the user’s browser with what’s happening in your services and infrastructure, all in one place.

What does RUM look like with groundcover?

In a nutshell, groundcover RUM collects detailed data on real users’ interactions with your web application, as they happen, including:

• Navigation events and page performance: Detailed metrics for each page visit, including average page load time, first contentful paint, and first input delay.
• User interactions: Every click or DOM event on your web app’s interface, such as specific elements clicked (such as buttons or navigation links).
• Custom events: Developer-defined events for significant user actions (such as opening a navigation drawer, completing a checkout). These are fully customizable to track business-specific insights.
• Frontend errors and exceptions: Captures JavaScript exceptions and errors directly from the user's browser, including stack traces and precise error messages (for example, "Invalid syntax or code structure").
• Comprehensive session context: Every user session is enriched with detailed context, such as user identifiers, session duration, browser type, OS, device details, and geographic location. This allows you to replay and analyze the exact sequence of user actions and the associated issues.

All this data is collected instantly through a lightweight JavaScript SDK running directly in your user's browser and seamlessly integrated into your existing groundcover backend. The result: a live, unified view of frontend user experiences alongside backend metrics, logs, and traces. If a user encounters performance issues or an error like a failed checkout, groundcover’s RUM immediately highlights when, where, and why - accelerating troubleshooting and improving user satisfaction.

How can frontend observability benefit your organization?

Frontend observability can supercharge your team’s ability to deliver a flawless user experience. Here are a few big benefits:

• Faster debugging and issue resolution: When something goes wrong for a user, RUM makes it visible immediately. Instead of guessing what happened on the client-side, you’ll see the exact error and user actions that led to it. Teams can quickly detect and fix frontend issues in real-world scenarios, reducing mean time to resolution.
• Real-time performance insights: RUM shines a light on how your application actually performs for end users. You can track web performance metrics like page load time, First Contentful Paint, or First Input Delay for every user session. This helps you spot slowdowns affecting users (perhaps only on certain browsers or regions) and optimize proactively. Rather than relying only on synthetic tests, you get actual performance data from real browsers.
• Improved user experience and engagement: By monitoring real user behavior, you can identify UX pain points or bottlenecks in the user journey. For example, if users consistently drop off on a certain page or spend too long on a step, RUM data will highlight that. These insights let you refine your frontend for better usability and ultimately happier customers. SREs and product teams alike can use RUM to correlate user experience with business outcomes (like conversion rates) and ensure that frontend issues aren’t undermining your success.

In short, adding frontend observability means you’re no longer flying blind on the client side. You have concrete data on what users see and do. This bridges the traditional gap between frontend developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs – everyone gets a shared view of the entire stack, client to server. When an incident occurs, you can now answer “was it the frontend or the backend?” with confidence and solve problems faster.

How does groundcover RUM work?

Let’s lift the hood and talk about how we built groundcover RUM, and how it seamlessly integrates into the rest of the platform.

Lightweight custom SDK for the frontend - We built a custom JavaScript SDK (from scratch) specifically for capturing frontend data. You simply add this SDK to your web app, and it will automatically instrument the app to collect the events and metrics described above. 

We designed the SDK to be as non-intrusive as possible - it’s small in size, adds minimal overhead, and auto-collects common data so you don’t have to hand-code a bunch of listeners. Because it’s purpose-built for groundcover, the SDK knows how to efficiently batch and send data without hindering the user’s experience. If you’ve used other RUM tools, you’ll find the setup familiar, but now it plugs into groundcover’s ecosystem directly.

Data flows into groundcover’s observability stack - Once collected in the browser, RUM data is sent to your groundcover backend where it flows into the existing observability data pipeline. In fact, we feed RUM events into the same storage and analysis systems that already hold your logs, traces, and metrics. This unified pipeline means you can query RUM data with the same tools and dashboards you use for everything else. 

Under the hood, RUM events become just another data stream in groundcover - they can be indexed, searched, and even visualized in Dashboards alongside your Kubernetes pod logs, or API request traces, for example. Moreover, each RUM event can carry contextual identifiers (such as session ID or correlation IDs) that link it with backend events. This opens the door to end-to-end tracing, where you can jump from a frontend click event to the exact backend trace or log entry that it triggered.

By pushing all the frontend telemetry into our “single source of truth” database, groundcover allows full-stack correlations that were nearly impossible, or at the very least very time-consuming, to achieve with separate systems.

We’re staying true to our philosophy of openness - this new capability doesn’t lock you in. In fact, you can leverage groundcover in parallel to your existing stack. Our goal is to make frontend data a first-class citizen in groundcover, no matter where it comes from.

The first RUM solution that keeps all your data 100% private and secure - One of the biggest advantages of using groundcover for RUM is keeping sensitive user data in-house. Real User Monitoring data is often rich with user details - page URLs, user IDs or emails, behavior patterns, maybe even form inputs. SaaS monitoring tools require, by definition, that all that data gets sent to a third-party cloud. groundcover’s architecture is different: our BYOC deployment means we run in your environment, so your RUM data - just like all other backend data such as logs, traces, and metrics - never leaves your infrastructure. 

This is huge for companies concerned about privacy, compliance, or simply not exposing user information. RUM data is essentially a recording of user activity, down to their clicks and inputs, so having it stored with “zero maintenance” overhead on your own systems is nothing shy of a game-changer. You get the benefits of a managed observability platform without handing over your users’ data to someone else.

Are you ready for the unique groundcover RUM experience?

Check out our docs for more information or book a demo with a customer engineer to see how it works!