Why Digital Experience Monitoring is a Must-Have for Modern IT Leaders
By Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint
What do cloud migrations, hybrid work, and increasing complexity in IT environments have in common? Hint: That’s not the start of a bad joke. They are part of the complex and evolving landscape that IT teams manage amid increasing user expectations. Fortunately, modern system observability techniques such as Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) are increasingly helping IT teams large and small keep up.
DEM refers to the practice of monitoring availability and performance to gauge end-user experience across modern and legacy applications. This in contrast with system-focused monitoring which focuses on infrastructure and application metrics. DEM can also illuminate user behavior and journey, from an observability perspective. It’s quickly gained traction among IT professionals and analysts as a must-have, to ensure a smooth experience for both internal and external users. In fact, Gartner recently recognized the significance of DEM in an inaugural Magic Quadrant report on the topic. There’s no question that IT leaders must prioritize modern monitoring tools to maintain seamless user experiences, drive business continuity and proactively prevent issues.
A monitoring strategy that proactively and continuously monitors systems from a user experience perspective mitigates the likelihood of disruptions and outages, by flagging issues potentially before they have an impact on real users. Proactive DEM monitoring can make a significant a difference, with one major telecom company reporting that it was able to prevent 15 outages, saving nearly 7,500 hours or productivity, within months of implementing such a monitoring strategy.
Focusing on digital experience is critical in today’s world. Organizations have shifted from traditional on-premises infrastructure to multi-cloud and SaaS environments, while at the same time, hybrid workforces depend on remote access to critical applications like Microsoft 365, Zoom, and Salesforce. In this modern digital environment, missing by an inch is the same as missing by a mile. For example, a retail website is considered available only if end users can complete transactions. Even if 99% of services are functional, the smallest failure at the checkout page can render the entire site useless. DEM provides essential performance information from the user perspective to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Adding to this complexity is the increasing reliance on third-party services such as cloud services, APIs, payment processing gateways, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), etc. that IT teams don’t directly control. Perhaps the most clear example of this reliance that I can point to is the Adobe Outage in December of 2023, which impacted many leading commerce sites. Organizations that relied on Adobe saw their sites fail. Without the proper monitoring of third party services, they found themselves in a crisis and spent valuable time and effort in a war room trying to diagnose the problem..
As user expectations rise, companies must ensure services are resilient, which means each services is reachable, available, reliable and high-performing – tested from the actual location where real-world customers are, not from a cloud note in a datacenter. That includes monitoring components like cloud computing; edge computing (DNS, CDN, Load Balancing, SDWAN, WAF, etc.); APIs that enable deep integrations with third-party services and continuous integration, delivery, and deployment.
DEM is not merely an IT tool; it is a vital business enabler that significantly influences customer retention and revenue. When done right, it has the potential to bridge IT and business teams by providing a common goal and set of metrics. It enhances employee productivity by ensuring that collaboration tools operate smoothly without interrupting workflow. Additionally, it protects brand reputation by preventing service disruptions that could cause lasting harm.
It’s time to prioritize proactive monitoring, close visibility gaps and take a user-first approach to IT operations. As digital environments grow more complex, DEM is evolving with AI-driven analytics and predictive capabilities, helping IT teams detect and resolve issues before they escalate. By embedding DEM as part of an IPM-centered strategy, organizations can improve resilience, user satisfaction and business continuity. This strategy translates to long-term business benefits by transforming user experience into a quantifiable asset – one that directly impacts customer loyalty and sustainable growth. In the end, DEM is about transforming IT operations to drive tangible impact in a digital-first world.
Mehdi Daoudi is CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint, the Internet Resilience company, which he started in 2008. His experience in IT inspired him to build the digital experience platform he envisioned as a user. He spent more than ten years at Google and DoubleClick, where he was responsible for quality of services, buying, building, deploying, and using internal and external monitoring solutions to keep an eye on the DART infrastructure, which delivers billions of transactions a day. Mehdi holds a BS in international trade, marketing, and business from Institut Superior de Gestion (France).