What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

5 min. read

End user experience monitoring (EUEM) allows IT to monitor and view the experiences its end users receive from IT services. EUEM solutions help companies of all sizes identify and prioritize IT fixes before they affect the bottom line. This requires data-driven insights that highlight both the current issues and what matters most to end users.  

By monitoring application experience from a user’s perspective and tracking performance KPIs, such as page load time, network latency, packet loss, resource download time, and CPU utilization,  you can easily pinpoint the cause of slow SaaS and third-party apps down to the device, network or application level and optimize for a positive end-user experience. No matter where that end user works from.

Why EUEM Is Important?

Your organization probably already has great tools to run its technology and support its IT operations, but how does IT know what the outcomes are for end users (i.e., the employees of your company)? The importance of monitoring user experience is vital as employees have increasingly moved to working from home, and organizations have embraced hybrid work models.  

Think about how a typical employee might start their day. They reach for their computer and expect to start working immediately. Instead, they’re greeted with a network connection issue or an app that is slow or crashes. Not a great way to start a productive day.

In order for business to continue flowing, employees need access  to the business-critical tools and systems needed for their day-to-day jobs, and enterprises need to know if these tools (e.g., Microsoft Office 365, Zoom) are performant from anywhere that users access them and if they are resulting in a poor user experience. Most enterprises use hundreds if not thousands of applications. Each application can perform differently based on each user as they are accessing apps via their local ISP, where before, when in the office, they were using the corporate network. 

When you prioritize user experience, over time, employees become more productive with fewer problems and benefit from a smoother troubleshooting process. When employee productivity increases so, too, does the productivity of the entire business.​​

The Evolution of Monitoring Tools

Today’s IT infrastructure has created many blind spots with traditional monitoring approaches. Tools need to evolve in order to keep up with the changing infrastructure, connectivity and services that support the dynamic needs of users on multiple devices, networks, clouds, and applications. If you want to truly gauge end-user experience, it is critical for your monitoring solution to have complete visibility across the entire digital infrastructure, whether it is in the control of enterprise IT (i.e., the corporate network) or not (internet, SaaS, etc.). 

One of the biggest challenges with traditional monitoring techniques is that they do not fully incorporate the entire service delivery chain in their analysis. The scope and complexity of the systems that IT needs to monitor have outgrown the tools built for the legacy model.

Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring defines the new requirements for monitoring as providing “visibility into the end-user experience as they interact with applications. According to Gartner, “Digital experience monitoring tools continue growing as organizations struggle to support customer as well as employee experience in the remote working world. DEM solutions help identify technology performance issues and align application performance to support business objectives.”

Traditionally, IT has monitored individual system components like the network (NPM) and applications (APM). Then, device performance monitoring emerged in an effort to get closer to actual end users. Using only point-specific solutions like these created fragmented visibility that still exists today for many enterprises. In many cases, monitoring tools suggest nothing is wrong; however, users are reporting problems. 

Enter end user experience monitoring. A solution that is bringing together all these disparate/point solutions into a single correlated dashboard for the easy isolation of problems and less finger pointing between APM, NPMD and EUM point solutions. A solution that can measure the impact of all the underlying IT components on end users. End-user experience and DEM monitoring solutions fill in the visibility gaps that traditional monitoring tools overlook and allow for network, security and IT teams to leverage the same data in order to optimize the end-user experience. However, choosing a good solution is more than just filling in gaps in visibility.

Methods & Capabilities Required for End User Experience Monitoring

In a hybrid workplace where employees work from anywhere, a combination of active and passive monitoring in a single platform is ideal for optimizing the end-user experience. There are three critical components to a successful end user experience monitoring strategy:

  • Endpoint monitoring: Endpoint monitoring should Include the collection of information about things like CPU utilization, memory usage and Wi-Fi signal strength to determine the negative impact those things may be having on a user’s digital experience. 

  • Real-user monitoring (RUM): RUM tracks performance based on data coming from actual users. It’s a reliable technique to monitor how the application is being used and how real-world parameters such as network latency, device variation and so on affect the end-user experience. 

  • Synthetic monitoring: Synthetic monitoring runs regular tests from a source to a destination, or from a user to an application, that allow IT to monitor network and application service performance even when they aren’t being used. This enables IT to understand the performance of assets they don’t own and can’t instrument, like SaaS applications and user ISPs. With synthetic monitoring, IT can easily diagnose a problem, because they have a baseline of app performance that enables them to pinpoint when and where the performance bottleneck is, like a network outage. 

By leveraging proactive network path diagnostics, real user experience metrics, actual app usage and endpoint data, organizations can have the visibility, speed and agility to easily assure the best end-user experiences.

 

End User Experience Monitoring allows you to see remote user and corporate site performance at the same time.
Figure 1: See remote user and corporate site performance at the same time


Key Advantages of End User Experience Monitoring

When employees can get their jobs done effectively and efficiently, many benefits accrue to the whole organization. That’s why many executives have invested in EUEM solutions. The benefits and results you are able to deliver after you deploy an EUEM solution include: 

  • Quickly identify problems in the service delivery chain so you can reduce MTTR and increase workforce productivity. 

  • Reduce costly ticket escalations by empowering the service desk with easy to understand visibility metrics that reduce escalations to expensive Tier 3 support teams.

  • Proactively manage and improve digital experience with proactive notifications to users of degradations in their service delivery path before they become a problem, reducing the volume of help desk tickets submitted.

End User Experience Monitoring allows you to see segment-wise experience insights across your entire enterprise with experience monitoring.
Figure 2: See segment-wise experience insights across your entire enterprise with experience monitoring


Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM)

Autonomous digital experience management (ADEM) helps IT teams see, understand and improve digital experiences for all their users.  ADEM delivers SASE-native visibility into digital experience, with segment-wise insights across the entire service delivery path, including intelligence gathered from endpoint devices, synthetic tests, and real user traffic. With ADEM, IT can solve application performance problems fast, and keep their business flowing.

 

 

ADEM provides:

  • Segment-wise insights: Distinct visibility per segment across the entire service delivery path expedites troubleshooting and remediation. ADEM scores and provides visibility all the way from the end user and the branch to the applications, so you have no blind spots. You’re able to measure user experience of the endpoint, the wifi, the router, the ISP, Prisma Access itself and each application in order to isolate areas of concern and resolve them.

  • SASE-native DEM: ADEM integrates with Global Protect, Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access Cloud for deeper visibility into SASE-based service delivery and operational simplicity.
  • Comprehensive visibility: With correlated performance metrics  across all endpoints, networks and applications - ADEM gives you all the visibility needed to manage user experience.

Learn more about how ADEM can deliver exceptional user experiences for your hybrid workforce seamlessly.