Overview
To get started with Datadog RUM Browser, you need to:
- Create an application in Datadog.
- Instrument your application.
Instrumenting your application allows observability data from your application to be displayed in the Datadog UI.
Instrumentation types
There are two ways to instrument your application: automatic or manual instrumentation.
| Auto-instrumentation (Preview) | Client-side (Manual) |
|---|
| SDK setup mechanism | Automatically add RUM JS to your web app HTML. Once RUM Auto-instrumentation is set-up, manage configurations from the UI. | Manually add the RUM SDK to your application code and manage configurations in code. |
| Code changes required? | No | Yes |
| Setup complexity | Low | Medium |
| User personas | SRE and engineering teams without access to frontend code, or teams who need to manage all observability needs centrally, may find this useful for:
- Unlocking performance data across all applications upon setting up RUM
- Holistically monitoring application performance across the organization | Frontend engineering, mobile engineering, or product teams with access to frontend code may find this method useful for:
- Daily engineering needs (for example: live support, troubleshooting, and health checks for downstream services)
-Product needs (for example: user flow analysis, user segmentation, and feature flag tracking)
- Capturing observability from in-house code or complex functions that aren’t captured by automatic instrumentation |
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
