What use case would necessitate using OpenKit over RUM instrumentation

[Sean_Weber]

Hi, I'm having trouble understanding whether OpenKit is intended for traditional browser session use cases. I know it's got uses in IoT, extensions, etc.. But when just dealing with tracking traffic on a regular website, is it useful anywhere? My first thought was the possibility to instrument each individual component in a micro front-end architecture, but after further thought that's probably either too much overheard and redundant because of RUM.

Sorry this question is neither concise nor specific 🙂

[JamesKitson · Accepted solution]

Technically both approaches are for Real User Monitoring (RUM) and generate things like user actions and sessions, the only difference is how we generate those.

In short if you're monitoring a browser that supports our JavaScript agent you should just be using standard RUM provided by our JavaScript agent and if needed you can do some customization to it via the RUM JavaScript API.

For mobile apps there is the Mobile OneAgent and corresponding SDK for customizations.

For anything else you'd be looking at using OpenKit as long as what you are monitoring is in a language with one of our OpenKit libraries. It is very flexible because you can create action etc... as needed but it is not designed for and should not be used for browser monitoring as the JavaScript agent covers that case. Basically anything that doesn't have a 'traditional' interface like a browser UI or mobile app.