What is Digital Experience Monitoring and why is it critical for every organization?

Have you recently experienced a customer service agent say, “Sorry, my computer is slow”? Have you been frustrated by a site that is not loading quickly? Have you had poor connectivity right when you need to have an important call? Well, you are not alone.

Why is it that customers and corporate users experience so much frustration? According to Gartner Research, 47% of technology users experience high “digital friction” on a daily basis. It is true that most human activity today is either digital or supported by digital processes. We depend on technology for our daily life.

However, while the software industry has been building and improving software for the past decades, and today there are very effective technologies for high availability, redundancy, and self-healing, there is another technology trend happening – the internet.

Yes, the internet is much more fragile than people realize. But it has been in the last few years that everything has become internet-based. Smartphones, SaaS, the cloud, and lately Covid have resulted in both users becoming increasingly distributed and internet-dependent, and applications becoming more modular, complex, service-oriented, hybrid, distributed, and internet-centric.

Let’s just say you want to check today’s news. A recent Web Page Test showed it takes 625 different calls to load the page. These include loading fronts from one site, ads from another, cookies, images from a CDN, tags, code snippets, APIs, etc. This does not include the back-end calls that happen to a content management system, database interactions, APIs to gather weather, and so on.

Each of these depends on a series of internet technologies and protocols to work: DNS, BGP, an ISP, etc. The collection of these technologies is called The Internet Stack. It’s a small miracle that all these 625 dependencies work in a few seconds – and it must be a few seconds, because users are increasingly impatient. Slow is the new down.

To help IT operations teams manage this complexity, get visibility into the internet stack, and deliver a great customer experience, a new category of tools has emerged - Internet Performance Monitoring or IPM. A subset of IPM is Digital Experience Monitoring, which has emerged as an essential tool for IT teams to ensure performance and maintain the reliability that users expect. Gartner introduced the first Magic Quadrant for DEM just a few months ago, signaling just how critical DEM has become. But what exactly is DEM, and why does it matter for your business?

DEM defined

According to Gartner, DEM tools assess the availability, performance and quality of the experience of applications, whether those users are customers, employees or even digital agents accessing APIs.

Combined with a broader observability strategy, DEM is becoming critical for an IT team’s toolkit, helping businesses maintain the user-centric perspective they need in today’s customer- and employee-driven digital environment.

DEM tools monitor actual and simulated interactions with critical applications, allowing IT teams to anticipate problems before an impact is even noticed. While traditional observability is like your car’s dashboard, revealing the details of the system’s inner workings like RPMs, oil temperature, and gas levels, DEM is like a GPS that focuses on the route to the destination, which is the ultimate goal. Both are important, but DEM provides unique visibility into how systems are performing from an end-user perspective — not just whether an application is up and running, but whether it’s meeting the expectations of those who rely on it every day.

Requirements for effective DEM

For DEM to be effective in modern IT Operations, it must meet a few critical requirements:

· RUM and synthetic testing: Synthetic tests provide proactive, controlled, ongoing tests that ensure a system is working and can measure very precisely changes in performance over time

· Global visibility: While some observability platforms offer monitoring from the cloud, these are insufficient for DEM as probably no users are accessing your applications from within a cloud data center which has very different connectivity and compute power. It is critical for a DEM to have thousands of vantage points around the world, in last mile, wireless, and backbone nodes, to effectively understand the experience of users in each relevant geographic area

· Visibility into the internet stack: For DEM to be effective, it must be able to provide intelligence on how data gets from one place to another, with a deep understanding of DNS, real-time BGP data, and flexibility to support multiple protocols such as SIP for telephony, MQTT for IoT applications, as well as modern internet technologies such as ECN and http/3. · Supporting SLAs and XLOs: A breached SLA can have significant impact and costs; certainly, something to avoid. With DEM, the opportunity is to focus on eXperience Level Objectives (XLOs), which have the potential to align IT with the business around the metrics that really matter and prove the value of IT investments.

The DEM advantage: Observability plus actionable insights

IT teams are expected to do more than just keep systems up and running; they must ensure those systems deliver value to end-users. This is where DEM’s focus on user experience truly stands out. Unlike observability platforms, which dive into the internal processes of applications, DEM offers visibility into how those applications impact actual user experiences.

This user-centered focus allows IT teams to spot trends in user behavior, benchmark performance, and identify areas for improvement — all while staying agile in a fast-paced environment. As DEM solutions continue to evolve, IT teams can expect an even more granular view of user experiences, from application-level performance to specific interactions with digital interfaces.

An unavoidable truth: Your digital experience is now synonymous with brand reputation. With DEM, organizations are able to create meaningful experiences for their users to connect with their brand. DEM provides IT teams with the tools they need to turn observability data into actionable improvements that keep users happy and businesses running smoothly.

DEM is no longer optional; it’s an essential component of success for any business connected to the digital world. By focusing on the experiences that truly matter to users, DEM empowers IT teams to monitor, measure and improve in ways that traditional monitoring tools simply can’t match. And with new tools and capabilities emerging, the future of DEM promises to offer IT teams even more powerful ways to ensure that digital experiences are always at their best.

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