Digital Experience Monitoring: A Comprehensive Guide for IT Leaders
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is an aspect of application performance monitoring (APM). The goal of DEM is to track end users’ digital experiences to ensure that application reliability and performance meet business and user needs.
DEM and APM evolved from end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) as part of a shift to a more comprehensive approach to managing the user experience. With the ability to proactively detect and troubleshoot issues, modern DEM enhances IT efficiency and user satisfaction.
Table of Contents
Understanding the Digital Experience Monitoring Landscape
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Real user monitoring (RUM) tracks real user interactions on the system. This enables the organization to monitor real-world application performance and user behavior. By doing so, an IT team can rapidly identify any existing issues and remediate them to minimize the impact on the user experience.
Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM)
Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) simulates user interactions via scripted transactions. This provides a more comprehensive view of how the system is behaving since it doesn’t rely on users to perform all potential actions at a given point in time.
With STM, organizations can proactively work to identify potential issues before a user performs a particular action. For example, STM may simulate infrequent events — such as processing payroll — to identify and address any potential issues before a real user initiates the process. Otherwise, the organization may be unaware of issues with the system until the next payday.
The Business Value of Digital Experience Monitoring
Greater Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Friction in the user experience can result in customer frustration, lost sales, and customer churn. DEM helps organizations avoid these issues by monitoring the customer experience in near real-time and proactively looking for potential issues to address before the customer experiences them.
This proactive approach to troubleshooting enhances satisfaction inside and outside the organization. Customers don’t experience the types of events that commonly cause churn — outages, slow page loads, etc. — and an organization’s employees avoid service outages and IT trouble tickets.
Improved Employee Productivity
DEM works both inside and outside of the organization. By monitoring mission-critical and high-use applications, the organization can address potential outages, performance issues, or bottlenecks that could negatively affect employee workflows.
DEM also enhances the productivity of the organization’s IT team. By catching potential issues early, IT teams have the ability to implement simpler fixes and avoid addressing the cascading issues caused by system outages, degraded application performance, or similar events. Simply eliminating the IT trouble tickets caused by an outage already has a significant impact on efficiency.
Reduced Operational Costs
DEM enables proactive monitoring and rapid detection and reaction to potential application performance and uptime issues. By reducing the potential for downtime or degraded productivity, it decreases an organization’s operational costs.
For example, an outage of a critical application could cause lost sales and impact SLAs. Additionally, time and resources spent rapidly troubleshooting and fixing an issue during an outage are taken away from other key IT responsibilities. Finally, centralizing visibility into a single dashboard reduces the time required for root cause analysis (RCA), enhancing IT efficiency.
Accelerated Digital Transformation Initiatives
With DEM, an organization can have in-depth, near-real-time insight into how its applications and systems are used by employees and customers. This enables a data-driven approach to digital transformation, where the company allocates resources to provide the greatest potential return on investment.
DEM also supports key projects, such as cloud migration, M&A, and global expansion. In these contexts, deep visibility and consistent application performance can help to eliminate potential delays in meeting business goals.
Implementing a Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy
Assessing Your Current Digital Experience Landscape
Effective DEM requires comprehensive visibility into an organization’s existing IT environment and aspects of its digital experience. The first step to assess what visibility and monitoring capabilities the organization already has in place, assess their level of integration, and identify potential inefficiencies or visibility gaps.
Setting Clear Objectives and KPIs
DEM can be used for various reasons, including improving sales and customer experience or enhancing the productivity of on-prem and remote employees. Before selecting solutions or making a plan, it’s important to clearly specify what would be considered a successful implementation and define metrics for measuring that success.
Choosing the Right DEM Tools
Various solutions exist that offer DEM capabilities. When assessing potential options, comprehensive, integrated visibility is a must-have for a successful deployment. DEM solutions should also support the full issue management lifecycle, including both issue identification and remediation.
Beyond these key capabilities, features such as the use of AI and ML for alerting and forecasting can be invaluable for managing the volume of data produced by a tool and generating useful predictions about potential issues.
Integration with Existing IT Systems
DEM is one component of an organization’s greater IT infrastructure and needs to be integrated with various solutions to achieve the necessary visibility, generate alerts, and assist with remediation. When selecting and deploying a DEM solution, it’s important to consider which integrations will be needed and ensure that data can flow in and out of the DEM tool to optimize the performance of both it and other IT solutions that can benefit from the insights it provides.
Best Practices for DEM Implementation
When implementing DEM, a good starting point is to identify critical user journeys for the target audience (customers, employees, etc.). Designing and implementing a solution for these user journeys and expanding outward enables the organization to rapidly address high-value use cases without attempting to build everything all at once. Additionally, defining and refining processes for these use cases will streamline the process of addressing other use cases down the road.
Key Features of Effective DEM Solutions
End-to-End Visibility
User experience can be impacted by frontend interfaces, backend infrastructure, and the networks that they communicate over. DEM solutions must offer comprehensive visibility, including both end-to-end visibility along a workflow and visibility across all workflows of interest.
Visibility is also impacted by the types of data available to the application. A combination of RUM and STM is essential to ensure that all aspects of an application are regularly tested to identify and address any issues before the user experiences them.
Analytics
A prime objective of DEM is to minimize the potential impacts of IT issues on user experience and employee productivity. To accomplish this, an effective DEM solution must perform its analysis and provide near real-time metrics.
These insights should also be available to IT personnel in an accessible format. Ideally, all data should be contained within a single dashboard, enabling personnel to quickly absorb high-level insights and dive into specific data as needed.
AI and Machine Learning Capabilities
AI and ML have various applications within DEM. One of the most significant is performing predictive analytics to help the organization find and fix issues before they impact the user experience. For example, AI/ML can correlate various RUM/STM events to identify trends that could indicate a potential issue.
AI and ML can also be used to perform root cause analysis (RCA) for identified incidents and to help prioritize remediation of various issues. Based on a set of correlated events, DEM can identify systemic problems or the underlying issue that requires remediation.
Dashboards and Reporting
DEM solutions should offer dashboards designed to support the various stakeholders within the organization. This includes both high-level analytics for the executive team and more detailed visualizations for IT personnel who need to be able to quickly identify, investigate, and remediate potential issues.
Overcoming Common DEM Challenges
Managing Tool Sprawl and Integration Complexities
Tool sprawl and complex integration are common challenges for IT and security teams due to the proliferation of point security products. Selecting a platform that converges many capabilities into a single solution and that offers API-based integration can help to simplify DEM integration and management.
Addressing Skills Gaps
IT Teams need the ability to identify and remediate user experience issues. Digital Experience Monitoring should provide the required information through networking stories to assist IT personnel at all levels to be efficient. Companies can close skill gaps through a combination of efficient and effective tools that provide an intuitive interface, as well as leveraging managed services offerings if needed.
Proactive and Reactive Monitoring
Ideally, DEM offers the ability to both proactively detect and remediate future issues and react to others in near real-time. However, limited resources can create competition between these tasks. Using a mix of synthetic and real-user monitoring approaches, and leveraging AI and automation can provide balanced visibility and resource utilization without overtaxing IT teams.
Security and Compliance Considerations in DEM
Ensuring Data Protection in DEM Practices
DEM collects a wide range of potentially sensitive data as part of its efforts to monitor and optimize the user experience. Failure to properly secure this data could have negative impacts on the company and its customers. For example, in-depth details about an organization’s IT operations can be used to identify potential targets for a cyberattack. DEM data should be classified based on sensitivity and appropriately protected using encryption and least privilege access controls.
Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and Other Regulations
Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) place limitations on how customers’ personal data can be collected and used and mandate how it should be secured. DEM solutions may collect information that is protected under these and similar laws, so an organization should be aware of its regulatory responsibilities and take the necessary steps to maintain compliance.
Integrating DEM with Cybersecurity Efforts
DEM has the potential to benefit cybersecurity efforts as well as IT management due to its extensive visibility and ability to forecast potential future IT issues. Integrating DEM solutions with cybersecurity infrastructure creates a mutually beneficial relationship. DEM tools can benefit from a shared context provided by security solutions, while these security tools can take advantage of DEM’s insights to identify, prioritize, and remediate potential vulnerabilities and cybersecurity incidents.
Measuring ROI and Communicating DEM Value
Defining and Tracking DEM-Related KPIs
A DEM program can provide various benefits to the organization. Some key KPIs to consider include:
- Number of IT incidents per quarter
- Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR) of IT incidents
- Average service downtime
- Application performance
Calculating the Financial Impact of Improved Digital Experiences
Demonstrating the business value of DEM requires the ability to quantify its impact on digital experiences. IT leaders can do so by measuring the reduction in downtime, lost sales, and lost productivity on the business. Quantifying the business value of these reductions helps to demonstrate the benefits of DEM.
Presenting DEM Insights to Executive Leadership
When presenting to executive leadership, IT leaders should focus on the tangible, measurable benefits of DEM. Identifying potential areas of improvement, such as reduced outages or application latency, enables them to build accessible, high-level dashboards for executive management. Simple trend lines or numbers that go up or down over time and have a clear business value demonstrate the impacts of DEM initiatives.
Future Trends in Digital Experience Monitoring
Advancements in AI and Predictive Analytics
AI is already used in DEM for predictive analytics, but the technology is improving by leaps and bounds. As AI improves, it will be able to make more accurate and valuable predictions about potential incidents or degraded performance. This will allow IT teams to make higher impact changes or to rely on AI and automation to instantly address identified risks.
Increased Focus on Employee Digital Experience
Often, DEM has focused on the customer experience and how removing friction can improve sales and revenue. Over time, DEM will focus more on improving the digital experience of an organization’s own employees. By doing so, it can benefit the company by improving productivity and morale and reducing employee turnover.
Convergence of DEM with Other IT Disciplines
DEM overlaps significantly with cybersecurity, IT operations, and other aspects of IT, both in terms of the technology used and overarching goals. Over time, solutions will increasingly converge to produce systems focused on monitoring and optimizing every aspect of an organization’s IT environment and preventing both natural and cybersecurity incidents from impacting the business. For example, proactive detection of potential bottlenecks within an organization’s IT infrastructure might inform both the IT team’s infrastructure investments and the security team’s determinations of the organization’s risk of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Taking Action on Digital Experience Monitoring
DEM has the potential to dramatically improve the user experience both inside and outside of the organization. With the right tools and strategy in place, an IT team can quickly respond to potential issues or prevent them entirely via proactive monitoring. This both enhances the user experience and reduces the cost associated with remediating these incidents.
An effective DEM strategy starts with defining goals and achieving the visibility required to achieve those goals. An effective DEM architecture has end-to-end visibility throughout the entire workflow for each user story that it addresses. Visibility gaps can result in missed detections and slower investigation and remediation as IT teams work to figure out the cause of a particular incident.
Customer satisfaction and employee productivity are vital to any business’s bottom line Implementing a DEM strategy enables an organization to actively monitor and manage these factors, providing tangible benefits to the business.