What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) extends Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) to view and optimize application performance issues from the end-user perspective. Gartner’s definition of DEM is a “performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises. This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behavior of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.”

Monitoring Apps You Don’t Control

SaaS Monitoring from Every Branch Office

As the digital transformation paves the way for modernizing IT infrastructure, IT managers are struggling to do their best to prepare a business case to move applications and services to the cloud. Although this type of transition is nothing new, measuring the end-user experience makes headlines for customers and employees. But when internal SaaS and web applications move to the cloud, IT loses control and visibility. The same goes for accessing external enterprise SaaS applications in the company. 

Understanding the workings of the cloud, the complex service provider environment, and the dependencies of service chains makes monitoring a challenge. And when these services are delivered to the end-user, there are multiple hops such as local ISP, gateway, Internet, DNS, etc. along the digital journey. Traditional monitoring tools fail to monitor the end-user experience and worse precisely to locate where the network bottleneck.

Work From Anywhere is Growing

The last webinar jointly hosted by Exoprise and Forrester underscores the need for IT to embrace experience strategy and prepare for a new future. There is a huge demand to work anywhere. Employees have adapted to a new “remote” reality and chances are your workforce won’t want to return to the office either. 

New business models are emerging that offer subscription services to work in cafes, hotels, private offices, and various residential environments. In each of these places, employees will work on different laptops, devices, mobile phones, and desktops. IT must be more than willing to incorporate these new circumstances into its monitoring strategy and adjust to the employee experience decentralization.

Browser-based Digital Experience Monitoring

Real User Monitoring for Browsers and Desktops

Most SaaS applications and services are accessed through a web browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Knowledge workers rely on the browser every day to search for information online or connect to WebRTC Microsoft 365 Teams for their next meeting. Developers create microservices applications and deploy them in Kubernetes in the cloud service using a web UI. It’s a useful argument for IT to monitor and further analyze the browser’s experience data. Why not? 

Collect advanced telemetry data on DNS timings, server ping, trace, packet loss, audio quality, TTFB, etc. helps significantly in troubleshooting network performance issues. During a browser experience problem, start by comparing the local web experience score (WXS) with the crowd-sourced data and halve your response time.

Data Analytics Advantage

Data is gaining relevance in multiple industries that drive workflow processes and business decision making. The same is true for monitoring. Aggregating metric data from multiple digital channels, portals, and touchpoints provides IT with new insights for a comprehensive experience picture. Just looking at an isolated ticket submitted to the help desk does not help a remote worker as it requires more context and can be costly to investigate. 

In addition, when an outage strikes, it affects the entire workforce and generates excessive incident tickets to manage with limited resources. Proactive incident management requires findings issues using monitoring data in the environment before it happens and promptly sharing with customers and employees. Quickly identify issues and perform diagnosis by visualizing and correlating data from multiple sources in analytical dashboards that update in real-time.

Better Together with Real User Monitoring and Synthetics

A monitoring solution like DEM is flexible and adaptable to today’s demands for a seamless digital experience in the workplace. Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) CloudReady sensors emulate a real user periodically testing Microsoft 365 and SaaS applications for uptime, availability, and performance without scripting requirements. Real User Monitoring (RUM) or user experience monitoring tracks and analyzes user interactions in real-time with a website or third-party SaaS application to troubleshoot slowdown and network issues from any location. 

Exoprise DEM solution strategy combines STM and RUM techniques to gain valuable insights into end-user experience and align IT initiatives with business outcomes. Increase SaaS visibility, boost employee engagement, and improve data visualization with a common DEM solution.

Free DEM 15-Day Trial

Sign up for a free 15-day trial. Try Service Watch Browser for up to 50 users and Service Watch Desktop for up to 25 devices in addition to the best Office 365 synthetics.

Jason Lieblich is a founder of multiple technology companies, Jason has an extensive track record of success with over 20 years of experience in distributed systems management, networking and security solutions.

Prior to founding Exoprise, Jason served as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, where he helped design, develop, and deliver advanced virtualization management and monitoring solutions for the XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer product lines. Jason joined Citrix through acquisition of Reflectent Software, Inc, a leader in end-user application performance-monitoring solutions, which Jason founded and served as CTO. In addition to his work at Exoprise, Jason sits on the board of directors for IntervalZero, a privately held real-time embedded systems provider. Jason holds two US patents and is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.