What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

Digital Experience Monitoring is a category of performance analysis technologies that provides visibility into the end-user experience, or what analyst firm Gartner calls the “omnichannel user journey.” That’s a fancy way of saying how the users behave as they interact with on-prem and cloud applications to do their job.

Application developers are beginning to recognize the value that DEM can bring to the end-user experience. For this reason, many DevOps teams are building in APIs early in the software development life cycle as part of the testing process of new releases. These APIs allow DEM systems to properly measure the performance of the end-user experience and the underlying application components. These more modern DEM solutions are especially sought after by infrastructure and operations leaders because they want to use DEM to regain insight into the performance of applications as they migrate to the cloud.

Network engineers also recognize the value of DEM. The performance of the network directly impacts the digital experience of application users. For this branch of DEM, synthetic traffic is generated to proactively measure network performance for packet loss, latency and jitter.

Since DEM can be used to measure the performance from the user’s point of view, the data collected can help uncover the impact that degraded performance can have on the business. We’re talking about everything from revenue generation to brand reputation and customer loyalty.

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) provides several advantages to enterprises that adopt it. One of the most significant advantages of DEM is the ability to improve the end-user experience. By monitoring end-user experience, organizations can quickly identify and address performance issues that impact customer experience and satisfaction. This ability can lead to better business outcomes, including increased revenue, improved customer retention, and increased brand reputation.

Another advantage of DEM is its ability to identify performance issues across digital processes. DEM solutions can monitor application performance and web security, enabling organizations to quickly identify and resolve issues that impact digital business initiatives. Additionally, DEM solutions can provide insights into the performance of third-party applications and services, enabling organizations to hold vendors and service providers accountable for their performance and availability.

Finally, DEM can also help organizations create better business outcomes by providing a comprehensive view of network and application performance. By analyzing the data collected through DEM, organizations can identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve the end-user experience, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

There are three primary technology components that make up DEM:

Synthetic monitoring uses agents to proactively test services such as SaaS applications like Salesforce and API endpoints. Unlike Real User Monitoring (described below), STM isn’t generally run against active users, although it could be. Its mission is usually intended to test the hosted or SaaS application (e.g., Salesforce, Office 365).

Synthetic monitoring techniques typically involve running a mix of HTTP commands (POST, GET, PUT or DELETE) on a regular and periodic basis. However, deeper testing can also be done on connection times and database query speeds. Depending on the synthetic monitoring solution in use, the frequency of such testing can vary from daily, hourly, or even down to one second intervals.

Synthetic monitoring can also be used to understand the performance of a website or web application in terms of specific user interactions with that site. This type of Digital Experience Monitoring is often termed “Synthetic Transaction Monitoring”. Learn more about these techniques in our Kentipedia article, “What is Sythetic Transaction Monitoring (STM)?”.

Metrics on response times, packet loss, jitter, and transaction times are gathered and sent off to the DEM collection platform where correlations are performed. With integrated DEM and NPMD (Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics), tests can be performed across different forms of telemetry like NetFlow, sFlow, VPC logs and even SNMP counters. AIOps techniques can be applied to get deeper insights as to why there is an application performance problem.

Endpoint Monitoring provides visibility into the user devices and performance testing from the endpoint. This includes things like the version of the operating system, CPU and memory usage, storage space and network metrics. While it can seem similar to desktop inventory software, the focus is on continued performance and availability.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is used to monitor and measure the end-user experience when using the applications the business depends on. These applications include things like the customer relationship management (e.g., Salesforce), collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams) and social media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook). RUM uses application-based monitoring (usually JavaScript) or browser plugins to look at the actual performance that users are experiencing. Usually this is available on a per-transaction basis, and includes telemetry on bottlenecks that may be due to browser CPU or RAM overload.

DEM and synthetic monitoring technologies can be applied to solve a variety of application and network infrastructure problems, reduce costs, and improve visibility into network and application performance. Key use cases include:

• Finding and fixing application or network issues before they impact users.
• Benchmarking and baselining the performance of applications, APIs, websites and networks across a variety of variables, such as performance across different time-frames and geographies, or performance against peers or industry standards.
• Holding vendors and service providers accountable by monitoring performance and availability versus SLAs (service level agreements).
• Preparing for significant network transitions, such as adding a new geographic market to a service offering or moving an existing data center to the cloud.
• Ensuring the performance of one’s own service offerings is adhering to customer SLAs, and providing regular reporing on performance versus such SLAs.

Synthetic tests conducted by a DEM solution will ideally be performed from multiple geographic locations in order to identify problems with specific network links and understand performance metrics with respect to users in different regions.

For example, Kentik has built out a global network of synthetic testing agents that are used by customers to verify performance levels of all major public or private cloud-based applications and SaaS applications. These agents have been located inside Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Clouds and these vantage points keep growing.

Despite the many benefits of Digital Experience Monitoring, there are several challenges associated with implementing a DEM strategy. One of the biggest challenges is the mix of technologies that DEM solutions rely on. To get a full picture of their digital experience, organizations need to pull data from a variety of sources, including synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, and end user experience monitoring. This can sometimes requires a complex technology stack that can be challenging to manage.

Additionally, the challenge of pulling the right data they need to get a full picture of their digital experience can be a major obstacle. DEM solutions need to be able to collect data on user behavior across multiple devices, applications, and networks, which can be difficult to achieve without the right tools in place. Furthermore, analyzing and interpreting the data collected can be a daunting task, as it requires expertise in multiple areas, including network performance monitoring, application performance monitoring, and web security.

Ideal DEM solutions help solve these challenges while still incorporating all the necessary capabilities. They need to provide a unified platform that can integrate seamlessly with existing technology stacks and provide actionable insights into the digital experience. Additionally, they need to provide easy-to-use analytic capabilities that allow users to easily access the data they need to make informed decisions. By addressing these challenges head-on, organizations can fully leverage the benefits of DEM to improve their digital processes and enhance end-user experience.

When evaluating potential Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tools, IT operations teams should look for solutions that offer the following components:

• End-to-end visibility: DEM solutions should provide full visibility into the end-user experience across all applications, including web and mobile applications, and endpoints.
• Real-time monitoring: DEM tools should provide real-time monitoring of user behavior and performance data to detect and troubleshoot issues as they occur.
• Synthetic and real user monitoring: Both synthetic transaction monitoring and real user monitoring are important components of DEM. Synthetic monitoring allows for proactive testing of applications and networks, while real user monitoring provides insights into actual user behavior and experience.
• Analytics and reporting: DEM solutions should provide analytics and reporting capabilities to help IT teams identify performance issues and optimize application and network performance.
• Seamless integration: DEM solutions should be able to seamlessly integrate with existing IT infrastructure and tools, such as APM and DevOps monitoring solutions.

The Kentik Network Observability Cloud offers a modern, SaaS-based approach to digital experience monitoring. Kentik delivers network performance monitoring and diagnostics that combine flow-based monitoring, cloud network observability and synthetic monitoring features to enable for proactive monitoring of all types of networks.

Kentik Synthetics is an autonomous, context-aware synthetic monitoring tool that enables businesses to measure the end-user experience from anywhere in the world. With hundreds of strategically positioned global agents in internet cities around the world and in every cloud region within AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud, Kentik Synthetics lets network teams automate test creation and get the context needed to make test results actionable. Autonomous tests allow testing towards a higher-level entity, and IP addresses are determined automatically based on actual network traffic. Kentik’s BGP monitoring lets businesses see BGP announcements and withdrawal events, paths taken, and get alerted to hijacks, reachability issues, and path changes. Kentik’s simple pricing offers more testing at a lower cost, with 2.5M credits per month for Kentik Pro customers and 5M credits per month for Kentik Premier customers.

Start a free trial to try it yourself.