UPDATE: New RUM experience now is live and no longer in preview :partying_face: We’re locking this thread for now, but in the meanwhile, we’re preparing a new version of this article, with a guide around the new experience
Summary: This thread highlights how Dynatrace RUM enhances digital experience monitoring. It covers key features, benefits, and configuration tips for improving user experience analytics.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) has become front and center within the observability space. That’s why customers have heightened demands to gain better visibility and analytics to better understand their end users’ experiences. At the same time, the landscape of web and mobile technologies is rapidly evolving, and Google’s core web vitals and new mobile vitals have shaped the industry significantly.
As a leader in observability, Dynatrace is going to launch a significative upgrade to its current solution for modern frontend monitoring. The new RUM experience will allow users to gain even deeper insights, further optimize user experiences across devices, and drive better business outcomes.
With this post, we’d like to inform you in advance about upcoming benefits and expected impacts, focusing on RUM and our new data model. We’re communicating details about the new apps and additional DEM enhancements in separate posts.
I’m sure you’re excited about what’s to come, and at the same time, you can prepare your organization for the changes and actions required and ask any questions that come to mind when reading this. We will try our best to respond to them in a timely manner. The post, including the FAQ section, will be updated based on your feedback and questions.
Grail and the latest Dynatrace
We have seen how logs, business events, metrics, and traces have benefited from being on Grail in the past 18 months. Starting in November 2024 (as part of an extensive preview program), your frontends will also be able to reap similar benefits. Existing as well as new use cases will be enriched with more data granularity, advanced querying capabilities and extended retention times on the new Dynatrace platform.
New RUM data model and Grail
The core of the improvement is a new, future-proof data model based on user and session events; which will subsequently be captured via a new OneAgent module, sent via an enhanced beacon protocol, ingested via OpenPipeline and stored into our new Platform and Grail. An event-based capturing approach allows us to unlock significant improvements in monitoring coverage as well as data analytics and AI. Events will enhance and elevate the value customers can gain compared to user actions today.
Real user monitoring data stored in Grail queryable via DQL will showcase a range of features designed to enhance your data analysis capabilities. One of the key features is extended retention of RUM data. This allows you to extend your individual retention time well over 35 days, providing a long-term view of your data trends.
In addition, we auto-capture all requests made by your frontend applications, including their W3C timings. These requests can then be monitored, analyzed and alerted on individually with the latest Dynatrace, offering a granular view of your frontend applications’ performance.
To help you better understand your end-users’ behavior, our new agent module can also auto-capture the main user interactions. This feature covers a variety of interaction types like clicks, scrolls, mouse-overs etc. provides better understanding for each interaction and navigation, enabling advanced user behavior analytics.
We’ve also made improvements to our data semantics and auto-enrichments. For instance, we will provide element context on user interactions and view-context on mobile performance data. This enhancement allows for a more straightforward but also in-depth analysis of your data.
If you’re running into property limits, our new event-based capturing and Grail will solve this. You can enrich +100s of properties on events and sessions to capture your individual context. With DQL, custom apps and custom anomaly detection, all this data is available at your fingertips. This feature allows for a more personalized analysis of your data.
Finally, if you’re unable to use cookies or don’t have a user session, there’s no need to worry. We are planning to also allow you to collect and analyze RUM data in session-less mode. This ensures that you can still gain valuable insights from your data, regardless of your ability to use cookies or establish user sessions.
Eligible existing customers (SaaS, access to Grail, DPS) need to actively decide to enable the New RUM Experience per frontend-level and environment-level settings.
New customers and tenants automatically receive the new RUM experience since July 2025 and are therefore included in the preview program by default.
After our GA in January 2026, all customers (SaaS, DPS) can enable the new RUM experience.
Technical impact of the activation
There’s no impact on the current capturing based on user actions on classic, therefore classic features, data ingest, metrics, dashboards etc. are not affected by its activation.
Web: Once the setting is enabled, additional configuration and capture code will be added to the RUM JavaScript. This will enable sending events to Grail in addition to existing data capture. It requires a minimum version of the RUM JavaScript. Despite the added capture code, the RUM JavaScript will still be smaller with better performance as we also invested in significant code cleanups and optimization. We are planning to provide evidence for this as well. Initial setup is documented here.
Mobile: OneAgent for mobile also requires a minimum version but as usual must be shipped together with the app first and downloaded by users before data is stored on Grail.
We are expecting an increased data volume sent from your end users’ browsers & mobile apps to Dynatrace as additional events and metadata are captured and are directly ingested into Grail where you can consume it within the latest Dynatrace.
Initial setup is documented here.
Consumption impact of the activation
RUM data ingest to Grail and also querying the data inside the upcoming new DEM apps on Grail will not be charged. Also, by default we store data for 35 days. Therefore, at GA in January 2026, no new billing mechanisms will be applied. Querying data (user events and user sessions) outside our core apps, hence in e.g. Dashboards, will be provided as early access and not charged neither. After early access period is concluded, we may introduce charging query outside of our apps.
Extended data retention is enabled upon request as part of a new preview program and within the preview period, not charged. Later on extended retention will be subject to DEM retain billing.
The new RUM experience is only available to customers on SaaS with access to Grail. A DPS contract (GA) is required.
Our preview program initially kicked off early November where we hand-picked the customers. Since March 2025 we gradually ramped-up the preview into a public format. Since July 2025, new customers and new tenants are enabled by default. The preview program is closed after Dec. 5th as we move towards the GA launch in mid-January.
Supporting material /contact
Public documentation is available and will be complemented and enriched gradually.
Please look out for updates on this post / comments from Dynatrace and public announcements and blog posts. Go ahead and make use of our in-product chat as well as approach your assigned Product Specialist, Customer Success Manager, Customer Success Engineer or Business Insights Analyst if you have individual questions.
FAQs
- What will happen to user actions?
- In classic apps (e.g. Dashboards Classic) and the current DEM features, user actions stay untouched – so zero impact on your metrics, analysis screens and dashboards.
- On Grail, user actions will no longer exist in this form. The data currently found within user actions will be stored in separate events, so it will be way easier to analyze the information we capture. E.g. user interactions (e.g. clicks, scrolls etc.) are stored as user interaction events and web requests (e.g. document, xhr,…) as web request events. So any event can be analyzed and monitored with high granularity and full context. As an example, a web request includes properties like the page, full-URL, geolocation, response code, start and end-time, duration and more.
- To understand overall timings (e.g. of a page load) we are offering web vitals, and users can view resource loads and their timings in Notebooks or in an updated waterfall chart.
- Also we’ll reintroduce user actions to capture the duration and relationship of a user interaction and the performance.
- Of course, we are listening to our customers’ needs and use cases and will adapt our plans accordingly.
- How does the data model look like?
- We will collect RUM events in the user.events table.
- with details about requests, navigations, errors and user interactions including additional auto-captured properties. Some properties are captured by default and any RUM event will include them. Other properties are captured in addition depending on the type of data collected. E.g. a web request holds the http.response.status_code . On top of this, customers can enrich the events with their custom properties as well or send in custom RUM events via APIs.
- We will generate user session aggregates stored as separate events in the user.sessions table.
- With details about users, the session durations and more. The properties of a user sessions are based on RUM events captured.
- For more information take a look at the semantic dictionary in our public documentation.
- We will collect RUM events in the user.events table.
- Can I turn off ingest into classic and completely migrate to the new RUM experience?
- No, currently you can’t turn off classic data ingest fur RUM . However, this will be possible in the mid-term.
- How do I know that the new agent module is active on my environment?
- You can access the global RUM settings or any frontend application specific settings. If you have permission to read the specific setting you can check if it’s enabled or not. The information can be retrieved via the default settings API as well. Also you can access telemetry data stored on Grail – e.g. via Notebooks and query RUM events. The Experience Vitals app also gives you an overview of your monitoring coverage with the latest Dynatrace.
- What permission is required to turn on this new module?
- Users who want to activate these modules and ingest to Grail need the permission to change the settings within the frontends (global or local). These are typically included in the monitoring admin permissions. From a technical standpoint, it is a Settings 2.0 schema.
- In order to access RUM data stored on Grail, users require the appropriate access permissions to the latest Dynatrace, relevant tables and buckets.
- Due to the change of capturing, will there be metrics not available with the new RUM experience?
- We continue offering built-in metrics based on current usage of metrics and customer feedback. We will add more over time. On top of this, customers can create any on-demand timeseries based on the events and their fields. In addition, OpenPipeline allows users to extract custom metrics on Grail.
- Some metrics are currently not planned to be offered on the new Platform, either due to the data model changes or because they are substituted by another one.