Build better SLOs with RUM and synthetic SLIs

Service level objectives increasingly rely on real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring to measure user experience directly rather than depending only on backend metrics, with Datadog reporting a 273 percent rise in customer-created synthetic SLOs from August 2025 to August 2026. Teams should reconsider their SLI data sources when reliability goals expand toward user actions, existing metrics miss failures in critical flows, or low traffic makes burn-rate alerts excessively volatile. Synthetic SLIs use scheduled, controlled tests to provide stable, traffic-independent monitoring of end-to-end journeys and regression risks, although their fixed frequency limits their granularity and precision for tight error budgets. RUM SLIs continuously capture actual user behavior, offering detailed insight into crucial actions such as payments and signups, but can be affected by bots, ad blockers, sampling gaps, device differences, network conditions, and changing traffic patterns. Using both approaches together can provide a broader view: synthetic monitoring verifies baseline journey availability, while RUM reveals how real users experience important operations. Datadog positions its Journey Monitoring preview as a unified way to connect synthetic and RUM SLOs with visualizations such as journey suites, funnels, topology maps, time-series charts, and pathways diagrams for diagnosing user-impacting issues.

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