Bridgitte Kwong
Will Roper
Real User Monitoring (RUM) helps teams understand exactly how their users experience their web and mobile applications—from load times to crashes and frustration signals. But traditional RUM models come with tough trade-offs: capture all sessions and overspend, or sample data and miss what matters. Fixed sampling rates may help manage volume, but they leave dangerous blind spots. Frontend errors, layout shifts, or performance regressions might slip through the cracks—especially during high-stakes releases—and code adjustments or redeployments can slow teams down even more. Ultimately, not every session is equally useful, but most RUM tools force you to keep everything or risk losing critical data. That drives up costs and clutter while you still miss valuable insights from the sessions you care about most.
With RUM without Limits™, we’re introducing a new model that gives you the best of both worlds: full session capture and cost-effective control. You get the visibility you need to monitor availability, troubleshoot faster, and make data-driven decisions without being constrained by fixed sampling rates or high retention costs.
In this post, we’ll explore the power of this new model and how teams are already using it to improve digital experiences at scale.
Never miss a critical issue
Every new release brings the risk of unexpected availability issues: performance slowdowns, UI layout bugs, critical crashes, or other regressions affecting the experience of end users. Traditional RUM tools, limited by static sampling, might miss these signals entirely. With RUM without Limits™, you can ingest 100 percent of real user sessions to capture every single user experience, from minor failing network requests to crashes. You're no longer forced to sample; you get full visibility into how your application performs across all users, devices, and environments.
For example, take a frontend team rolling out a new checkout flow for a high-traffic app. In the past, this team paid for 100 percent session retention to avoid missing critical issues but ended up storing low-value data and saw costs spike as traffic grew. With RUM without Limits™, they can still capture every session but choose to retain only the ones that matters most, like sessions from their new app version where users completed checkout, and those where users encountered issues such as crashes, slow loading times, or with frustration signals. When an issue surfaces, they can catch it in real time, isolate the cause, and fix it without overspending or waiting for user complaints.
For teams where digital experience is critical, this means full visibility, smarter cost control, and faster resolution.
Optimize application availability with accurate performance metrics
When KPIs are based on sampled data, critical issues can go unnoticed. RUM without Limits™ solves this challenge by computing 30+ high-fidelity metrics from 100 percent of user sessions before any sampling or filtering takes place.
These metrics are accurate across your entire user base and retained for 15 months at no additional cost, and they are ready to use in SLOs, dashboards, and alerts with no custom instrumentation required.
That means you can immediately monitor availability trends and detect regressions, track SLOs to manage frontend health and maintain smooth digital experiences, and pinpoint slow-loading views and high-impact performance bottlenecks.
From app startup time and crash rates to Core Web Vitals and frustration signals, these built-in metrics provide both real-time and long-term visibility into application health. They’re enriched with key dimensions like OS, browser, region, and app version for deep filtering and segmentation. Even if you retain only a small portion of sessions, your metrics remain complete and reliable, so you can optimize user experience without inflating storage costs or relying on custom queries.
You can explore the full list of captured metrics in our documentation.
Control what you retain and prioritize what matters
With RUM without Limits™, you can ingest all user sessions for full visibility and retain only high-value data using dynamic, no-code filters in the Datadog UI. Teams can focus retention on sessions with frontend errors, crashes, failing network requests on critical views such as login or checkout, unresponsive UI, and from specific versions, environments, or high-value users. The possibilities are endless: teams can target any type of event and filter on any kind of metadata, whether those are provided out-of-the-box by Datadog SDKs or added as context from the client side. Filters are applied in sequence, so you can prioritize critical sessions first and set broader catchall rules at the end to manage retention volume. This keeps storage costs aligned with business value, while giving you full control over what data is kept.
For example, an ecommerce team launching a seasonal promotion can retain sessions with checkout errors, high Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), or activity from premium user cohorts. Instead of sifting through thousands of low-impact sessions, they can quickly zero in on issues affecting revenue and user experience.
Once a session is retained, Session Replay lets engineers move beyond abstract data points to see issues exactly as users experienced them. These replays make it easy to reproduce bugs and correlate frontend issues with real behavior.
This leads to faster resolution, stronger team alignment, and insights that directly reflect your business priorities without the burden of storing unnecessary data.
You can explore the full list of retention filter options and use cases in this guide.
Get started today
RUM without Limits™ is now generally available in Datadog. You can start using it today to capture 100 percent of session data for complete visibility into your users' experience while retaining only the sessions that matter most to your team. With high-fidelity, out-of-the-box metrics and dynamic retention filters, you’ll gain the insights you need to monitor availability, troubleshoot faster, and optimize user experience without overpaying for data you don’t need.
Check out our RUM documentation for more details and guides. Existing RUM users should contact their Datadog representative to switch over to our new RUM without Limits™ model. If you’re new to Datadog and want to see how RUM, metrics, logs, and traces work together in a single unified platform, you can start a 14-day free trial.
