Overview

Journey Monitoring lets you track the health of critical user flows such as login, checkout, or media streaming, all from a single place. For any given flow, you can answer:

• Are users experiencing friction?
• How fast and reliable is performance?
• Are issues coming from the frontend, network, or backend?

A journey is a user flow defined by a start event and an end event. For example, a checkout journey captures the experience from a user landing on the checkout page to completing the checkout process. Journey Monitoring pulls in data from Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring & Testing, Product Analytics, and Session Replay to show traffic, conversion rates, uptime, and errors for each journey in one report.

This gives engineering, product, and developer operations teams a shared view of journey health without switching between tools.

Capabilities

For each journey, you can:

• Measure the journey’s inbound traffic, conversion rate, and time to completion
• Track the journey’s availability using an uptime SLO based on its Synthetic test suite
• Identify where users drop off and investigate individual sessions with Session Replay
• Measure the performance of critical steps in the journey with RUM operations
• Share a unified view of journey health across engineering, product, and developer operations teams

Prerequisites

Journey Monitoring requires the following products for frontend applications, each contributing different data to your journeys:

• RUM without Limits and Product Analytics: Traffic, conversion rate, time-to-convert metrics, and performance.
• Synthetic Browser Tests or Synthetic Mobile Tests: Uptime tracking through the journey’s automatically created test suite.

Journey structure

The start and end of a journey can be either action or view events from Real User Monitoring.

Each journey can have one or more variants. A variant is a specific sequence of intermediate steps a user takes between the journey’s start and end. Different users naturally take different paths. For example, some may skip optional steps while others take detours before completing the journey.

Setup

Define a journey by selecting its start and end events, then extend coverage with data from your other Digital Experience products.

Step 1 - Create a journey

1. Navigate to Digital Experience > Journey Monitoring.
2. Click New Journey or select a suggested journey.

Step 2 - Specify journey details

1. Select a frontend application.
2. Add a journey name.
3. Select one or more start events.
4. Select one or more end events.
5. Click Save Journey.

The right-hand funnel chart updates automatically based on the selected start and end events. The funnel shows volume, conversion rate, and average completion time for each step.

Note: Mandatory fields are pre-populated if you start from a suggested journey.

You can also add a description, attribute filters, team ownership, tags, and variants. Clicking Save Journey creates the journey and redirects you to the journey’s details report. The details report includes metrics on the journey’s volume, conversion rate, and average time to completion.

Step 3 - Add coverage from other products

In the journey’s details report, you can extend monitoring coverage based on the products you have:

• Create RUM operations to monitor the performance of critical steps in the journey in your real user environment
• Add Synthetic tests to the journey’s test suite to start tracking uptime

If you already have pre-created RUM operations or Synthetic tests that cover the journey, Datadog surfaces the operation or test in the journey’s details report.

Metrics

Each journey and its variants have the following performance metrics:

• Traffic: Total number of journey attempts across user sessions. Based on the rum.measure.journey metric.
• Conversion: Percentage of journey attempts that were completed. Based on the rum.measure.journey metric.
• Time to convert: Average time to complete the journey across all user sessions. Based on the rum.measure.journey.duration metric.
• Uptime: Availability of the journey based on its Synthetic test suite uptime.

What’s next