Understand web performance through the eyes of your users

The Embrace User Timeline is a detailed, chronological play-by-play of everything that happened during a real user’s session, from initial page load to the end of a session.

This timeline includes:

• Page navigations and route changes
• User actions and interactions (e.g. clicks, scrolls, form inputs)
• JavaScript exceptions and errors
• Performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Layout shifts and rendering issues 
• Network requests, asset loading, and slow responses
• Custom events and product-specific instrumentation, such as user flows and activities

All of this is stitched together in a single, unified view that shows not just what happened but when and in what order, giving you unmatched visibility into the user experience.

Let’s say you’re seeing an uptick in bounce rates on your pricing page. Traditional RUM tools might show that LCP is slower than usual or that an error rate has increased. But those aggregate signals don’t help you explain the problem or actually help you fix it. 

Embrace, on the other hand, gives you the full context into what your end user was doing in the lead-up to the issue. Instead of having to try and manually reproduce certain conditions or try and “trigger” an error in your own environment before attempting to resolve it, you can isolate the real user sessions that experienced the issue and retrace the actual steps those users took. 

Analyzing these sessions in the User Timeline might illuminate causal factors associated with the issue you’re analyzing, such as: 

• A slow third-party script delaying render
• A layout shift that caused a CTA button to jump out of view
• A user click that triggered a failed network request
• A JavaScript exception that broke a carousel component
  

With full visibility into both the behavior and the underlying performance data, you have the context you need to troubleshoot an issue quickly and effectively. 

This level of insight also fosters collaboration across engineering teams. Developers can diagnose and fix bugs faster, QA can validate real-world issues, and product managers can quantify how performance impacts engagement and conversion.

Embrace’s User Timeline is different from other monitoring solutions in the market because it’s designed for true user-centric observability. While most performance tools let you visualize high-level metrics and dashboards, Embrace focuses on the individual user and their full experience. 

Every session timeline is directly tied to a real person using your site or app, in their real environment, with their browser, their device, and their network conditions. That means you can isolate issues affecting specific cohorts (like mobile Safari users or users on slower connections), helping you prioritize fixes that will drive the biggest impact.

Embrace automatically captures these sessions without sampling. That means you won’t miss the long tails, edge cases, or intermittent bugs that can easily be missed when relying on metrics-based tooling or error-only reporting. 

The hardest part of debugging web performance issues often is not knowing that something went wrong, but rather knowing why and how.

The Embrace User Timeline is designed to give you exactly this type of insight. It accelerates time-to-resolution by providing: 

• Full session context, not just isolated events
  Reproducibility, without needing to rely on user reports
• Impact on actual users, so you can understand how performance is driving behavior

Whether you’re chasing down a slow funnel, investigating a spike in JS exceptions, or trying to understand how recent code changes affected UX, the User Timeline helps you move quickly from signal to solution. 

Read to explore it for yourself? Check out our docs for more in-depth detail about the Embrace User Timeline and all the data it captures. If you’re looking to get started for yourself, you can create a free account and start sending sessions to Embrace today.