Establish your current state

Review instrumented pages

Our browser monitoring tools are a great way to monitor your app data, and so the best place to start with improving your digital experience is reviewing your browser dashboards. First, you'll need to review your browser apps and pages to make sure that everything you expect to report to New Relic is actually doing so. You can do this by reviewing the Page Views tab in the browser monitoring UI for each app you're ingesting or by running the following NRQL query:

SELECT uniques(pageUrl) from PageView LIMIT MAX

Validate browser URL grouping

After you've made sure that your instrumented pages report their data correctly in the previous step, it's time to ensure browser segments are captured correctly so that you can better parse the data that you're using to improve your customer experience. If you're unfamiliar with segments, they're simply the text between two /s in a URL or the .s of a domain name.

When you have a lot of URLs with a lot of segments, you can abridge them so that website.com/product/widget-name becomes website.com/ or website.com/product/. While the first version does work, the second version is a more useful way of grouping customer experience data for the product because it allows for more segments in the data.

Once you've identified all your segments, use the Segment allow-lists in browser to add them, which will enable you to create more easily understood segments.

Understand how to segment your data

Now that you've validated your browser URL grouping, you can make your customer experience data easier to understand by breaking it out into different segments. Unlike the previous step, segments here don't refer to sections of URLs (as in the segment allow lists), but instead refer to groups of data.

You can use segments to group your data in different ways. For example:

• Most of the users in the US, Canada, and EMEA experience 2 seconds or better to interaction to next paint, while users in Malaysia and Indonesia experience 4 seconds. Grouping your segments by geographical location would give you this insight.

• Customers buying car insurance typically see 1 second to largest contentful paint. For home insurance, it's 4 seconds.

• In one week, there can be 700,000 page views on mobile browser apps compared to 300,000 on desktop.

  Here are popular and useful categories to segment your data:

  Region and Location

  Basic: Group by country. Browser events automatically contain the country code of requests, so there's nothing you need to do to break it out further.

  Advanced: Make regional grouping match regional SLO groups by creating your own region attribute using custom attributes in browser monitoring.

  Facet by countryCode.

  Related attributes:

  • regionCode
  • city
  • asnLatitude
  • asnLongitude

  Device

  Break out performance and engagement device type so you can understand:

  • Typical breakdown of desktop vs mobile browser users

  • Experience of desktop vs mobile browser users

    Facet by deviceType.

    Related attributes:

  • userAgentName

  • userAgentOS

  • userAgentVersion

  Product or line of business

  When a product is a separate line of business or service provided by an organization. Some examples of industries and respective products:

  • An insurance company that sells both car and house insurance.

  • A media company that has multiple streaming services or channels.

  • A travel company that provides car rental as well as hotel bookings.

    Basic: Break out performance by product by:

  • Faceting on pageUrl: Use this approach when you group multiple products into one browser app in New Relic.

  • Faceting by appName: Use this approach when you instrument each product as a separate web app.

  • Grouping by appName and then facet: Use this approach when you hsbr multiple apps in browser supporting one product.

    Advanced: Add product offerings as custom attributes to browser pages using custom attributes.

  Environment

  A naming convention that specifies the environment for browser apps during or after instrumentation . Well named browser apps specify products and/or functions as well as environment. Examples:

  • account-management.prod

  • hotels-book.prod

  • car-insurance.uat

    Use app naming conventions to note that the environment supports filtering data in both the UI and in dashboards. For more information, see our docs for how to rename browser apps.

  Team

  In some organizations, a single team supports multiple products, while in others, a product is big enough to be supported by multiple teams. Report on team performance against customer experience or engagement by either adding the team name to the browser app name in New Relic (for example, account-management.prod.unicorn-squad) or by using custom attributes.

Import the quality foundation dashboard

The next step is to create a dashboard you can use to measure and improve your customer experience against your baseline performance. To do this:

1. Go to the Quality foundation quickstart.

2. Follow the instructions in the quickstart to install the dashboard.

3. Use the provided guide to customize it to fit how you plan to segment the data.

   Tip

   Make sure to align the dashboard to lines of business or customer-facing offerings rather than to teams to maximize the impact of your optimization!

Capture current performance for each dashboard page

The last step in establishing your current state is to capture your current performance from the dashboard pages. To do this:

1. Follow the instructions on our Quality foundation GitHub README, which walk you through the segment allow list and quality foundation dashboard.
2. Use the dashboard from the previous step to understand the overall performance for each line of business. If relevant, apply filters to see performance across region or device. If values drop below targets and it matters, add it to the sheet as a candidate for improvement. Examples of tracking-value:
   • Not worth tracking: A company that sells insurance in the US only notices poor performance in Malaysia.
   • Worth tracking: A company that sells insurance in the US only notices poor performance with respect to mobile users in the US.