Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is a unified solution designed to track, analyze, and enhance user interactions with digital services. It ensures a seamless digital experience, fostering better performance and user satisfaction.
DEM provides comprehensive visibility into user journeys, encompassing application performance and network conditions across various platforms. By leveraging real-time data, businesses can proactively identify and resolve issues, ensuring an optimal digital experience. This approach helps in maintaining high standards of service and boosts overall user engagement.
What are the critical features of Digital Experience Monitoring?In financial services, DEM is pivotal for maintaining secure, fast transactions, and in retail, it ensures a seamless shopping experience across digital platforms. In healthcare, it safeguards the reliability of critical applications and patient data transmission.
DEM is a crucial tool for organizations aiming to enhance their digital interactions, ensuring seamless performance, better user satisfaction, and overall operational efficiency.
By using a DEM solution, IT teams can track and measure different factors that can impact users, such as CPU, memory, and hardware usage, latency, software performance, and more. In turn, these metrics, which are gathered continuously from the endpoint and combined with intelligent analysis and automation, can then help IT departments quickly diagnose, remediate, or even predict problems without notification from the user. In addition, having a DEM solution is important because it can identify any vulnerabilities that contribute to outages, downtime, or disruptions to the user experience, such as slow page load times, and can also assess the root cause of issues that affect performance while simultaneously recommending 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:
Some of the biggest advantages of having a DEM solution include the following:
When researching different DEM tools, here are some features to look out for: