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Real Use Monitoring (RUM)

Adobe Experience Manager uses Real Use Monitoring (RUM) to instrument operations data to understand checkpoints on how a site functions and performs on Adobe Experience Manager-powered sites. RUM data can be used to diagnose performance issues, and to measure the effectiveness of experiments. RUM preserves the privacy of visitors through sampling (only a small portion of all page views will be monitored) and judicious exclusion of all personally identifiable information (PII).

RUM and Privacy

Real Use Monitoring in Adobe Experience Manager is designed to preserve visitor privacy and minimize data collection. As a visitor, this means that no personal information will be collected by the site you are visiting or made available to Adobe. As a site operator, this means no opt-in is required to enable this feature.
AEM RUM does not use any client-side state or ID, such as cookies or localStorage, sessionStorage or similar, to collect usage metrics. There is no “fingerprinting” of devices or individuals via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other data for the purpose of capturing sampled data.

It is not permitted to add any personal data into the RUM data collection.

RUM data is sampled

Traditional web analytics solutions try to collect every single visitor. Adobe Experience Manager’s Real Use Monitoring only captures information from a small fraction of activities tied to page views, with no concept of identifying a visitor or a user or even a browser session. Under normal circumstances the sampling rate is one out of one hundred page views , although site operators can decide to increase or decrease this number.

As the decision if data will be collected is made on a page view by page view basis, it cannot be used to track interactions across multiple pages. RUM has no concept of visits, visitors, or sessions, only checkpoints during a page view. This is by design.

What data is being collected

RUM is designed to prevent the collection of personally identifiable information. The full set of information that can be collected by Adobe Experience Manager’s Real Use Monitoring is:

No other data is being collected.

What data is being stored in the visitor's browser

For sites that use the built-in experimentation feature, the name of the experiment and variants that the visitor has seen are also stored in the browser's session storage.

How RUM data is being used

Adobe uses RUM data for following purposes:

Data Overview

Data Stored in browser Sent to data collection Persisted Usable for identification/fingerprinting
Site host name no yes yes no
Data collection server no no yes no
Client IP address no optionally never yes
User agent no yes masked yes, when unmasked
Timestamp no yes masked yes, when unmasked
Full URL of page visited no no no yes
URL of page visited, without URL parameters no yes yes no
Referrer URL (without URL parameters) no yes yes no
Page View ID yes, for the duration of the page view yes yes no
Weight (Sampling Rate) yes, for the duration of the page view yes yes no
Checkpoint no yes yes no
Source no yes yes no
Target no yes yes no
LCP no yes yes no
FID no yes yes no
CLS no yes yes no
INP no yes yes no
TTFB no yes yes no
Experiment variants (only when using Experimentation) yes, for the duration of the session yes yes no

The data collected and stored is designed to prevent:

  1. Identification of individual visitors or devices
  2. Fingerprinting
  3. Tracking of visits or sessions
  4. Enrichment or combination with personal identifiable information from other sources

Other than Adobe, following third parties are involved in the collection of RUM data:

RUM for Developers

We have additional in-depth information for developers that want to use Adobe’s RUM data to optimize their own sites, including instructions on how to add RUM instrumentation to your site, even if it's not running on AEM.