Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides insights into user behavior and application performance. By leveraging formulas and functions in RUM monitoring, users can create alerts that trigger on new trends and ratios of user activity. Formulas allow for arithmetic operations between queries, while functions provide higher-level mathematics to transform query results into actionable insights. Using these tools, users can build meaningful monitors that track ratios and percentages of overall activity or compare data to previous time periods, reducing alert fatigue and providing a clearer picture of user experience with applications.