What Is Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)?

DEM or Digital Experience Monitoring tools enable us to view an app’s performance from the user’s perspective, speed up root cause determination and resolution, optimize the customer journey and digital transaction, and isolate service performance problems.

Organizations use DEM to help them with a simple solution to user performance issues. You can use this single solution to gain insight into various networking tools. It can observe and model user behavior and interactions as a customer journey. It supports the optimization of all these avenues and focuses on performance analysis. It aims to improve performance and build productivity within the organization.

Why Is Digital Experience Monitoring Important?

Digital experience monitoring solutions help IT teams quickly mitigate user issues, and it helps them ensure the network stays undisrupted. These solutions complement NPMD – Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics and APM – Application Performance Monitoring tools. These tools provide a clear end-to-end picture and add insight into the user experience; this is important as UX translates into business outcomes.

Network Monitoring

Network monitoring tools are domain-centric. These tools were great when the organizations owned and controlled everything from the network, the endpoints, and the apps running on your hardware. The tools organizations used most relied on NetFlow, SNMP, DSCP, or network-based PCAPs. These were enough to troubleshoot performance issues and get predictable network performance. 

However, these tools did not provide visibility into every issue that impacts user experience. It has become much harder to use network monitoring tools now as users are moving off the network, and services and apps are moving to the cloud. Due to this, testers detect and fix performance issues much later than expected. With digital experience monitoring, things work much more differently.

Benefits of Monitoring Digital Experience

Organizations can benefit from DEM solutions in several ways, such as:

• DEM solutions give IT teams a clear, user-centric picture of everything happening across networks, cloud infrastructure, endpoints, and applications.
• IT teams can troubleshoot and remediate issues more seamlessly and quickly. IT teams must be able to surface insights quickly and resolve issues before they impact user performance. Regardless of where users are – working from home, from the office, on the road, or all three scenarios combined, DEM solutions ensure IT teams can provide effective solutions without disrupting end-user experience and productivity.
• Balancing implementing security controls with a seamless digital experience is a challenge. Users find a way to get around security measures that increase latency or make it difficult to access programs. When this happens, unauthorized software can get access to sensitive data. DEM solutions help IT teams provide seamless and straightforward security by giving them insight into their security policy. IT teams can use this insight to run rapid impact analyses and fine-tune their rules around security. This catered approach will ensure your employees use authorized devices and services that the organization can manage and help improve productivity. 

Organizations should make sure that the tool is giving at least the following capabilities when choosing a DEM solution:

• Endpoint monitoring provides IT teams with visibility into the user’s device performance. They have more clarity on the user’s system and app state; this helps them rapidly detect issues and fix them before they impact the user experience and, ultimately, the business.
• Network monitoring provides in-depth analytics on network performance by enabling network diagnostics and connectivity. It can provide these analytics even when users use apps outside the corporate firewall and details on the web domains that the employees use. All this helps reduce threat exposure. 
• User sentiment helps gather insight into user experience by having IT teams conduct user satisfaction surveys. While these surveys are subjective, they offer insight into the perspective of your users and help you understand them better. 
• The best way to improve the digital user experience is to ensure proactive remediation; this involves using automation to fix and correct discovered issues. 

Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring

DEM solutions can come as siloed point products. These solutions have the following challenges:

• They leave blind spots that cloud security causes.
• They force your team to correlate from multiple point solutions manually.
• DEM solutions optimize reactively instead of proactively.
• They require regular maintenance. 
• Offer no actionable insights.
• They lack Cloud nativity.

HeadSpin DEM solution seamlessly integrates into your existing environment and lets you start improving your user experiences immediately. You can track digital user experiences on real devices in over 100+ locations worldwide.

Conclusion

Working from home was utilized more as a perk with particular processes to enable employees to use it. Now? It has become a requirement. The working methods have changed, and companies must examine their long-term strategies. They need to find ways to accommodate work from home and, with it, DEM strategies. These strategies will help ensure their users (employees) get seamless access to tools to maintain productivity and empower businesses.