Best Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Solutions

Instead of assessing how network elements are working, digital experience monitoring tools analyze how users and endpoints interact with an application and evaluate its behavior from their perspective. DEM solutions can detect when an application is producing unexpected behavior to determine whether something is going on with either an element of the network or the application itself.

DEM monitors the network interface of all endpoints and detects characteristics when an element of the network isn’t working as expected. If there are no malfunction indicators but the application is still underperforming, the problem is most likely an issue within the application or even the application’s infrastructure.

DEM is the combination of three different monitoring techniques:

1. Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM): This type of front-end monitoring uses behavioral scripts to recreate potential user actions so that performance issues can be eliminated before real customers are affected. Synthetic traffic is generated to collect data on things like page performance, and scripts are created to simulate a flow that a customer or end user would take on a site. Those paths are then continuously monitored at specified intervals for performance indicators such as functionality, availability, and response time.

2. Real user monitoring (RUM): As its name indicates, RUM records all real customer interactions with your existing application from the user's perspective, allowing DevOps teams to find and repair problems swiftly and with minimal setbacks to other users. A JavaScript tag is used to track the user’s interactions with the site and reports metrics such as response time, server time, the user’s location, and the user’s device.

3. Endpoint monitoring: The third type of monitoring tool, endpoint monitoring, tracks both activity and risks on all the devices of your network. In addition, it enhances visibility, access, and the ability to detect and address threats.

Like many technologies, DEM has its own set of challenges. Some of them include:

• Division of responsibilities: It is important to establish a unified view of your digital experience beyond just the IT department. For example, if your app involves contractors or third parties, the bigger view is larger than your company itself. When using a DEM solution, it can be challenging to allocate responsibilities and to assign a central command that takes a unified approach to keeping internal and external teams in agreement.

• Different technologies: For companies who base their businesses on different technologies, implementing a DEM solution can be challenging, especially if your organization uses several different applications.

• Prioritizing privacy and compliance: DEM can involve finding new ways to mix and match monitoring and consumer data across platforms managed by different vendors, and can become an issue when dealing with privacy and compliance.

• Cultural shifts: Implementing a DEM solution requires a cultural organization shift. Although IT departments are responsible for DEM, other teams also play an essential role. A business can only ensure high-level digital experiences for its customers through close cross-team collaboration. Communicating this and achieving a collaborative environment is often a hurdle for DEM implementation.

• Cost: Some organizations may shy away from implementing a DEM solution because of the costs associated with it. Besides the initial costs, it takes a great deal of effort to integrate a DEM solution into your ecosystem without it affecting your existing customers, which can also cause organizations to be more hesitant to implement it.

Some of the biggest advantages of having a DEM solution include the following:

• Increased employee productivity: DEM implementation allows you to identify the nature of technical issues that are common in the workplace, that may otherwise cause frustration and affect the productivity rates of both your in-office and your remote employees. With a DEM solution in place, problems are automatically flagged and resolved.

• Proactive mitigation: It is in your organization’s best interest to remediate issues before they occur or cause major damage. With a DEM solution, issues are proactively mitigated, and sometimes even solved, before they do any harm. By using a DEM, IT teams can receive alerts and can easily and quickly attend to problems.

• External services transparency: With cloud services becoming more and more popular, it is difficult to be in total control of your entire infrastructure. A DEM solution can help ensure that any third-party services your application is using are working as promised. Additionally, it offers custom metrics that will give you a clear view if an external vendor is negatively affecting your product’s performance.

• Full-stack monitoring: By having a DEM strategy, you gain full-stack visibility into your IT infrastructure, systems, applications, and user experience. Furthermore, you gain a detailed understanding of how your resources are performing by taking advantage of historical trends.

When researching different DEM tools, here are some features to look out for:

• End-to-end digital customer experience: A good DEM solution will offer a comprehensive digital picture with the ability to measure, monitor, and analyze digital performance across all channels (IoT devices, websites, and mobile apps.)

• Scalability: It is important to make sure a DEM solution can provide sufficient scalability because it can affect the overall cost as well as the ROI. In addition, depending on your requirements and digital transformation plans, it is useful to have either on-premise options or a cloud deployment option.

• Performance and availability: Having real-time performance indicators, such as website response times or page load speeds, are essential if your organization relies on digital channels to conduct business transactions with users. There should also be functionality included within the tool, so you can create custom dashboards and reports based on organizational needs, including health checks, availability tracking, and being able to view historical data without having any additional coding knowledge or skill sets.

• Customer service level reporting: It is important to have a customer service level reporting feature included with your DEM solution of choice. Having insight into your customers’ sentiments provides an opportunity to quickly resolve any potential problems right from within a central management console so you don’t have to worry about costly IT resources required elsewhere throughout the business.