Announcing the General Availability of Splunk RUM Session Replay

In today's digital landscape, delivering a seamless user experience is not just a nice-to-have — it's a necessity. As businesses increasingly rely on web applications to engage customers, the stakes have never been higher. 

Today, we are delighted to announce a significant enhancement to the Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) product: the general availability of Browser Session Replay. With Session Replay now at your fingertips, you can bid farewell to guesswork in troubleshooting user journey issues and experience a substantial reduction in the mean time to resolution (MTTR). This groundbreaking feature empowers you to witness firsthand what your users experience on your site, paving the way for optimized user experiences and enhanced performance.

Session Replay = Reduction in Guesswork & MTTR

Time is of the essence in resolving user experience issues. By eliminating guesswork and accessing real user sessions, you can expedite the troubleshooting process and significantly reduce MTTR. With Session Replay, you can now gain an unprecedented level of clarity into your users' journey by replaying individual user sessions, capturing every interaction, click, scroll, and navigation in real time. Unraveling the mysteries of user behavior becomes effortless as you gain access to a wealth of information that will transform the way you perceive and enhance your web applications. This means happier users and more productive teams.

No more sifting through long waterfalls: Traditional troubleshooting methods like long waterfalls often leave you guessing about what might have caused a user's frustration. With Session Replay, you can see precisely what your users saw and did during their session. Replay user interactions like clicks, scrolls, form submissions, and more, and get to the heart of the issue without any ambiguity.

No more troubleshooting with incomplete repro steps: By capturing a user's entire session, Session Replay provides engineers and support teams with a comprehensive view of the user's interactions and behaviors on a website. This detailed insight eliminates the frustration of relying on incomplete or vague descriptions from end users, streamlining the troubleshooting process and ultimately leading to faster issue resolution.

No more waiting on customer calls to clarify the issue: The detailed visual information eliminates the ambiguity that often arises from verbal explanations, enabling support teams to swiftly diagnose and address the problem without the delays associated with waiting for customers to clarify the issue over audio or video calls.

Why Splunk RUM Session Replay?

Private out of the box: Security and privacy are paramount, and Splunk Observability understands the importance of safeguarding sensitive user data. Session Replay in Splunk RUM is designed to be private out of the box, so personally identifiable information (PII), like user email, addresses, etc., are not captured as part of the replay. Text input and elements are redacted at the instrumentation layer, so PII is obfuscated before the replay data reaches Splunk Observability.

Seamless Integration with RUM waterfall: As an integral part of the Splunk RUM, Session Replay seamlessly integrates with the existing waterfall. It allows you to analyze user interactions in the context of performance metrics and error spans, enabling you to identify and prioritize the most critical issues quickly. Span waterfall and replay playback are correlated, so you can review the end-user session at the exact time when a javascript error occurred. 

Ready, Set, and Action

Integrating Session Replay into your web application is straightforward. Whether you are an existing Splunk RUM customer or new to our platform, integrating with Splunk RUM and Session Replay javascript libraries requires minimal effort enabling you to start reaping the benefits of Session Replay in no time. Refer to Splunk RUM Session Replay documentation here for complete steps. 

Customer is responsible for using Splunk Observability Cloud in compliance with applicable laws, including but not limited to providing notice to and obtaining any necessary consent from individuals whose data will be collected by Customer's use of the services. 

Once the Session Replay javascript library is added to your web application, you can go to the RUM Overview page to discover impacted sessions. Let's take an example where a user has submitted a support ticket since they were not able to place an order on the e-commerce site. The site reliability engineer inputs the session id of the user who submitted the support ticket to find their user session in Splunk RUM quickly. 

On the session details page, the engineer discovers several critical details associated with the session, like the user journey, the page load waterfall, and error spans. However, interpreting this information involves guesswork, reading through long waterfalls, and potentially hours of investigation. Now with Session Replay, the engineer has the option to view the video-like replay of the end-user session with a click of a button. 

Upon review of the session replay, the engineer discovers that the end-user was unable to click on the place order button within a few minutes. They can review the replay with the waterfall to understand the severity of the impact and the steps leading to the error. Additionally, Splunk Session Replay's private out-of-the-box design has redacted PII from the replay, so the engineer doesn't have to manually sanitize or redact playback before review. 

The site reliability engineer can also click on specific spans in the waterfall to correlate the replay timeline to the exact event they're interested in. In this example, the engineer reviews the user experience when the fonts API is loaded in the waterfall. This span-to-replay correlation provides powerful debugging functionality to engineers, which results in a drastic reduction of guesswork and thereby reduces MTTR

Try Splunk RUM Session Replay Today!

Discover the transformative power of Session Replay in Splunk RUM and see how it revolutionizes your troubleshooting processes. Reduce guesswork, accelerate mean time to resolution, and gain a deeper understanding of your users' journey like never before.

Sign up for a free trial, or visit the Splunk Real User Monitoring product page for more!