What is Digital Experience Monitoring
Digital experience monitoring (DEM) makes it possible to get a view of application performance issues from a user experience vantage point, isolate service performance problems across the delivery chain, speed up root cause determination and resolution, and optimize digital transactions and customer journeys.
According to Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring:
“Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises. These users, human or digital, can be a mix of external users outside the firewall and inside it. This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behavior of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.”1
Where Does DEM Fit In?
DEM solutions complement existing application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) tools. Together, they provide an end-to-end picture, with DEM also adding insight into the user experience. It is those experiences that most directly translate into business outcomes.
Vendors of experience monitoring solutions tend to rely on a mix of technologies, including:
- Real user monitoring (RUM) or browser telemetry (using JavaScript injection)
- Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) for web- and mobile-based end users
- Synthetic monitoring for applications and network path analysis
- End user experience monitoring (EUEM)
- Monitoring of endpoints and user behavior via desktop and mobile agents
- APM agents and NPMD probes
In addition, NPMD capabilities such as network traffic monitoring provide increasingly important data sets that make troubleshooting of user experience problems faster and easier.
While some of these technologies are already in use, the trick is being able to pull together the data they collect – or find new data — to arrive at the experience picture.
Considerations to keep in mind when formulating a DEM strategy and evaluating experience monitoring tools include:
- Is the solution cloud- or appliance-based?
- How much additional instrumentation will be required?
- Can you consolidate existing tools for greater operational efficiency?
- How will DEM address new converged SD-WAN and SASE architectures as part of the user-to-application delivery chain?
- How long will it take before the solution begins delivering results?
DEM Core Benefits
DEM can enable you to:
- Get a user-centric view of what is actually transpiring: How is the endpoint performing? What applications are in use, and how are they performing? What does the underlying network path look like? How are your software-as-a-service applications holding up? How is network traffic behaving?
- Isolate problems affecting performance, starting with determining whether it’s the end user device, the network or the application.
- Prioritize performance problems for remediation based on where you can get the biggest bang for your buck.
Analysts are bullish on the DEM market, and DEM is growing at a double-digit compound annual growth rate. This growth highlights the importance of DEM in enterprise digital transformation initiatives.
To learn more about DEM, read our blog post Why Digital Experience Management Is a Must-Have.
- Sanjit Ganguli, Charley Rich, Federico De Silva, “Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring,” Gartner, 05 September 2019.
