As digital transformation continues to thrive, more companies are turning to complex IT infrastructure, platforms, and solutions. The growth of cloud platforms, Software-as-a-Service, and remote working has expanded the network through which users interact. However, this has also made visibility, management, and resolving issues a lot more challenging for companies. A wider and more complicated field makes monitoring the digital experience of users difficult. Ultimately, a company wants its users to have the most efficient, effective, and seamless digital experience. This is why monitoring digital experiences is so important. Previously, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools were used to monitor and collect data on the performance of applications to help improve user experience. As newer technologies emerged, these APM tools were integrated with other capabilities to produce what we know as Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). Digital Experience Monitoring tools combine advanced analytics, pattern recognition, and other features to offer companies comprehensive insight into the user experience. These DEM tools are crucial for any business as they create better visibility and collaboration across platforms to ensure efficient service, solutions, and problem-solving.
In this blog article, we explore what Digital Experience Monitoring is, why it’s important, and how it can be used to make your business better. We also look at the benefits and challenges of using a Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy. Now, let’s get a better idea of what Digital Experience Monitoring really is.
What Is Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)?
Gartner defines Digital Experience Monitoring as technologies that monitor the availability, performance, and quality that an end user or digital agent experiences when using a device or application. Essentially, Digital Experience Monitoring will observe and optimize the overall digital experience of users. This means enhancing the experience of anyone using the platform – whether it relates to faster loading webpages, performance troubleshooting, or more.
Digital Experience Monitoring is a user-centric framework that finds ways to enhance the experience of all its users - this includes both employees and clients. The main goal is to make complex IT systems easier to navigate, secure, and see. An effective DEM strategy can help companies resolve user issues quickly, point out vulnerabilities, and gain crucial data to enhance the entire business. Studies have found that the global Digital Experience Monitoring market will be worth US$ 6.53 billion by 2031 – let’s explore why DEM is becoming that important.
Why Is Digital Experience Monitoring Important?
Digital Experience Monitoring solutions give companies a uniquely comprehensive and cohesive analysis of user experience that would be too complicated or muddied to interpret before. Most companies have fragmented teams that specialize in specific areas to maintain a smooth-running machine. While effective, these different groups can splinter responses and actions from within the machine. DEM tools offer more unified and collaborative insights to identify weak spots, resolve issues, and offer streamlined and tangible improvements in real time.
DEM analytics also play a critical role in enhancing performance across platforms. A more efficient digital experience for users will attract more revenue, customer loyalty, and a better reputation. These tools are vital to creating an enhanced journey for all users. This leads us to figure out how Digital Experience Monitoring actually works.
How Does Digital Experience Monitoring Work?
Users jump between apps and websites rapidly each day. This means that every platform, webpage, and service needs to be running effectively at every moment to ensure the best user experience. The “digital experience” can be understood as any interaction between a user and company made possible by technology. This means websites, social media, mobile apps, smart devices, and more.
Digital Experience Monitoring ensures that your digital experience is seamless through continuous tracking and analysis of web, apps, and API data metrics – including memory, network traffic, and more. All this data can show companies which areas need attention, gain the most traction, and could use an upgrade. This can elevate the overall digital experience of users and make more people want to use a specific app or platform.
Gartner estimates that by 2026, at least 60% of I&O leaders will use Digital Experience Monitoring tools to measure application, services, and endpoint performance from the user’s viewpoint. However, there are many different types of DEM tools that companies can make use of today.
Types of Digital Experience Monitoring Tools
Digital Experience Monitoring tools come in several shapes and forms. They each play their own role in finding issues, performing analysis, and resolving problems to improve user experience. These DEM solutions ensure proactive diagnostics and root-cause analysis to help reduce waiting times and enhance response rates. Some of the main Digital Experience Monitoring tools include:
1. Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) Tools
This is a technique used to monitor applications, websites, and APIs by simulating user actions and analyzing the response. This is done by running a mix of HTTP commands to understand the system’s reaction to specific user prompts and transactions. This acts as a testing ground before real users interact with the platform. Also called proactive monitoring, synthetic monitoring includes platforms like Sematext, DynaTrace, and Pingdom.
2. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools
These are the DEM tools that mainly provide insights into the functionality of applications. This includes response times, error rates, and analysis. APM tools are typically integrated with other DEM tools to provide a complete overview of a user’s digital experience. Popular APM tools include AppDynamics and Stackify Retrace.
3. Real User Monitoring (RUM) Tools
Unlike synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring uses the interactions of legitimate users to provide insights and analysis. Using JavaScript-based monitoring or browser plugins, RUM tools can track user behavior and gather performance metrics. These are also called End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) tools. Some examples of these tools include DataDog and New Relic Browser.
4. Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Tools
These NPMD tools focus on the functionality of networks. To ensure optimum network health, NPMD solutions analyze end-to-end network traffic, packet loss, latency, and other network-related elements. While these tools are centered on the network primarily, they can be combined with DEM tools to enhance user experience as well. Examples of good NPMD tools include Paessler PRTG and Netflow Analyzer.
5. Endpoint Monitoring Tools
Finally, the endpoint monitoring tools are aimed at keeping endpoints working effectively. This means a focus on the performance and availability of user devices - such as laptops, mobile phones, and desktops. By analyzing CPU, storage, connectivity, and security from these endpoint devices, endpoint monitoring can diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting user experience. Popular endpoint monitoring tools include Sangfor’s Endpoint Secure solution for comprehensive endpoint management and security.
All these Digital Experience Monitoring tools work together to ensure comprehensive control and management solutions to enable the best digital experience for users across every platform. However, these various options might not be enough to convince you yet so let’s explore some of the several benefits of DEM tools as well.
Benefits of Digital Experience Monitoring Solutions
There are different ways that Digital Experience Monitoring tools can address and resolve issues for your company. A happy user means a happy company at the end of the day. We’ve rounded up some of the main benefits of using DEM solutions to elevate user experiences:
- Performance Optimization – Naturally, the first advantage of using DEM tools is that it streamlines your performance across platforms. Companies can easily and quickly resolve bottlenecks, latency, and lagging issues to ensure faster loading speeds, enhanced processing, and smooth interactions.
- Accessibility Improvement – DEM tools can also help to create a more accessible and unified dashboard to address issues. This means that desktop, network, security, and helpdesk teams can easily collaborate and provide agility for more effective user experiences.
- Reliability Enhancement – With DEM tools, actions and solutions are based on data-driven analytics and insights. This means that all solutions are rooted in user-centric pattern recognition – making them more reliable to improve user experience.
- Cost Effectiveness – Through a comprehensive single pane of glass framework, DEM can drastically reduce the operational expenses of running multiple complex monitoring solutions and using vast amounts of resources – from tools to skills.
Moreover, Digital Experience Monitoring solutions are better at integrating with broader IT solutions. These tools can be incorporated across platforms to optimize operations in several ways. All these great benefits of DEM tools are quite convincing, but you might be wondering how your company can implement a Digital Experience Monitoring strategy in the first place. Well, we’ve got you covered there as well.
Developing a Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy
Digital Experience Monitoring is a big step for your business in controlling and ensuring the best user experience. This is why a proper Digital Experience Monitoring strategy needs to be put into place for it to be effective. To do this, you need to understand your user experience goals and how you plan to achieve them. Some of the key components of your Digital Experience Strategy should include:
- End-to-End Visibility: Your DEM solutions need to ensure complete and comprehensive visibility across the network into all user endpoints to be effective.
- Benchmarks and KPIs: Benchmarking and KPIs allow you to baseline and rank the performance of your applications, websites, and APIs across the industry to seek out differences across geographical locations, time frames, and peer solutions.
- Continuous Monitoring: Naturally, a large part of Digital Experience Monitoring involves constant real-time monitoring. This gives your system continuous protection and allows you to find flaws and potential problems faster.
- Proactive Issue Resolution: Synthetic and Real User Monitoring are both examples of proactive DEM tools that seek out vulnerabilities from the user’s perspective.
- Seamless Integration: Your DEM solutions need to integrate and collaborate easily with your existing IT infrastructure to be effective.
- Generating Reports: Data analytics are another primary function of DEM tools which means you need to be generating reports on performance regularly to optimize functions as needed.
- Feedback: The best way to understand user experience is to simply ask users for feedback regarding their experience. Try to add surveys or prompts that ask for ratings or reviews to get a better idea of how users feel. This can be incorporated into your DEM strategy to enhance it for the future.
Creating the ideal DEM strategy for your company’s needs can be simple with the right knowledge and skills. However, many people are still hesitant to commit to Digital Experience Monitoring. Let’s try to understand why that is by looking at some of the challenges faced with DEM tools.
Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring
Implementing a robust and effective Digital Experience Monitoring solution can be a difficult hill for many companies to scale. Some of the common issues people run into when installing DEM tools into their business involve:
- Diverse Technologies – Many DEM tools were not cloud-native and could only adapt to traditional IT infrastructure. Modern software DEM solutions are now more unified for the cloud as well. This means that your entire system needs to be altered to manage the complexities of virtual DEM solutions.
- Balancing Depth and Breadth of Monitoring – To collaborate monitoring across such a wide expanse can be quite challenging as well. Multiple endpoints demand analysis and attention which can lead to blind spots within the system without effective correlation.
- Real-Time Monitoring Challenges – Having consistent and continuous monitoring can be a tedious task for any company. With collaborations from both machine and human resources, this can be a tiring process that yields slow or no results at times.
- Expenses – Implementing newer technologies comes with its own set of costs. From skills and infrastructure to maintenance and management, your DEM solution might tighten your wallet in some areas.
- Data Complexity – User experience will generate a large amount of data that needs to be processed and analyzed efficiently. This means adapting effective data management solutions and storage that can handle big influxes of data regularly.
While there are many challenges when implementing the ideal Digital Experience Monitoring strategy for any company, the benefits surely outweigh the risks. Compromising on user experience is not an option for a business dedicated to providing effective services.
Digital Experience Monitoring for a Brighter Future
For any company, digital transformation can be a scary process. However, to advance and thrive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape, you need to adapt or get left behind. Digital Experience Monitoring is a crucial and intensive process of improving the user experience when using a system. Based on advanced analytics, pattern recognition, and integrated technologies, the DEM framework is a necessity for any company to succeed. There are several DEM tools at your disposal to help you create a comprehensive strategy for the betterment of user experience across applications, websites, and APIs.
We’ve covered the benefits and challenges of implementing a robust Digital Experience Monitoring solution and can easily conclude that DEM tools are not only a great help but a vital technology to ensure an enhanced digital user experience. Businesses should take it upon themselves to invest heavily in DEM solutions to create a thriving and balanced digital environment that resolves issues, offers valuable insight, and ensures the ultimate user experience. Contact Sangfor today to find out more about creating the best platform for your users.
