Session replay

CloudWatch RUM session replay allows you to capture end user sessions for your web application. You can play back these sessions to visually see what users experienced, helping you identify issues, understand user behavior, and troubleshoot problems.

To protect user privacy, all text input and text displayed on the page is masked by default. This means that sensitive information such as names, addresses, and other personal data is not recorded.

Enabling session replay

To use session replay, import the RRWebPlugin from the aws-rum-web package and add it to the eventPluginsToLoad array in your web client configuration. For more information about installing the web client as a JavaScript module, see Configuring the CloudWatch RUM web client.

The following example shows how to enable session replay.

import { AwsRum, AwsRumConfig } from 'aws-rum-web';
import { RRWebPlugin } from 'aws-rum-web/plugins/rrweb';

const config: AwsRumConfig = {
    identityPoolId: 'us-west-2:00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000',
    sessionSampleRate: 1,
    telemetries: ['errors', 'performance', 'http'],
    eventPluginsToLoad: [new RRWebPlugin()]
};

const awsRum: AwsRum = new AwsRum(
    'APPLICATION_ID',
    '1.0.0',
    'us-west-2',
    config
);

The RRWebPlugin accepts optional configuration options, such as sampling rate and recording behavior. For the full list of available configuration options, see the CloudWatch RUM web client configuration on GitHub.

Privacy and data masking

Session replay masks all text input and text content on the page by default. This includes form fields, labels, paragraphs, and any other text rendered in the DOM. Masked content appears as placeholder characters during playback, ensuring that personally identifiable information (PII) is not captured or stored.

Viewing session replays

After you enable session replay, you can view recorded sessions in the CloudWatch RUM console. Navigate to your app monitor and choose the Session replay tab. This tab displays a list of recorded sessions with details including session ID, duration, start time, browser type, and device type. You can filter sessions to show all sessions, sessions with errors, or error-free sessions.

You can also find sessions with replays in the Sessions tab. Any session that has a replay available displays a play button next to it. Choose the play button to open the replay player.

Choose a session to open the replay player. The player shows a visual playback of the user's session, including a timeline of interactions on the right side. The timeline displays each user interaction, such as page navigations, scrolls, clicks, and text inputs, along with the timestamp when each interaction occurred. You can use the playback controls to adjust the speed (1x, 2x, 4x, or 8x) and skip inactive periods.