What is digital experience monitoring?

Delivering a seamless digital experience for customers and employees is increasingly critical for organizations wanting to maximize their IT investments to achieve the best possible business outcomes. And that's no secret. According to Gartner®¹, “by 2027, 90% of enterprises will use synthetic and real user monitoring to enhance the user journey and better understand user interactions with their software as a service (SaaS) applications and services.”

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is the practice of using tools and technologies to evaluate metrics from multiple sources that affect end users—such as applications, distributed cloud networks, user behavior, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, location-based data, and more—to determine the quality of a user's interaction with a digital touchpoint. DEM provides real-time metrics, reports, and alerts on key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your organization.

Keeping track of digital experience (DX) is a crucial part of an end-to-end observability strategy. DEM helps teams understand the context of what’s going on amid the interactions happening across the multitude of apps, services, and infrastructure of a multicloud environment. When integrated with a holistic approach to observability, DEM, including real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring, provides important details into how transactions and issues impact the business.

^{1. Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring, Mrudula Bangera, Gregg Siegfried, Padraig Byrne, 20 November 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.}

Implementing a successful DEM strategy optimizes digital services to enhance user satisfaction across digital platforms. It also drives business value from IT initiatives and innovative digital experiences. Additional benefits DEM provides include:

DEM continuously monitors various aspects of digital experiences, such as application performance, website responsiveness, and network latency. Proactively detecting issues in real time helps ITOps achieve fast mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR) for technical failures that can ruin the user experience. For example, alerting when page load time slows down, or detecting sudden drops in conversion rates due to a soft failure.

DEM provides detailed analytics and metrics on network and application performance, such as load times, transaction speeds, and error rates. This data enables organizations to pinpoint bottlenecks and optimize the specific resources, services, or other factors that impact user experience the most for better overall performance.

DEM streamlines IT operations and reduces manual effort by prioritizing issues that matter most to the business. IT teams can then focus on strategic initiatives rather than issues, ultimately improving efficiency and productivity. For example, among a series of alerts lies the root cause of a sudden dip in conversions. It can indicate an issue that affects all users or certain users and user groups, such as paying customers. With the right DEM solution in place, you can automatically pinpoint the exact underlying cause, such as a faulty API, and prioritize it over other less consequential alerts.

DEM not only captures technical performance metrics but also provides insights into user behavior and preferences. By correlating technical data with user satisfaction and engagement metrics, organizations can better understand their customer base, enabling them to deliver digital experiences to meet their needs more effectively.

DEM can help minimize the impact of downtime and service disruptions with AI-driven real-time monitoring to predict and prevent issues before they affect end users. This reduces the potential revenue loss from support expenditures and damage to a brand's reputation. Furthermore, RUM enhanced with session replays enables customer support teams to quickly resolve customer complaints with video-like insights into their unique user sessions to streamline communication and reduce support time.

Organizations often face monitoring challenges that may arise from their customer base, brand goals, and current IT infrastructure—such as coordinating legacy systems with cloud-based solutions—but three common challenges that often occur with digital experience monitoring include:

Behind each digital touchpoint with which a user interacts, there’s often a microservices architecture running in a multicloud environment. These cloud environments make it possible to deliver features faster and more efficiently, but they also introduce complexity. Between layers of services on multicloud platforms, Kubernetes architecture, and open-source technologies, the number of things that can—and do—go wrong with a user experience has exploded.

A user’s context, such as location, device, service provider, and more, can significantly affect the user experience (UX). For example, if one user interacts with a digital asset on a mobile phone while riding the commuter train, while another sits at home in front of a smart TV, they are both trying to achieve the same goal, yet the context of each interaction is different and could impact their experience.

In distributed multicloud environments, IT, DevOps, and other teams often lack adequate visibility into the application delivery chain. This affects their ability to identify an issue's root cause and remediate incidents in real time or near real time. They also often receive multiple alerts for different, seemingly unrelated symptoms of a single root-cause problem. Relying on time-based correlation to link these alerts is not precise and requires time-consuming investigation.

To address these challenges, IT teams should take a platform approach with AIOps and advanced observability for a unified view of the user journey from start to finish with the context of each touchpoint. By integrating user data from multiple sources into a single monitoring and analytics platform, organizations can achieve a holistic view of their employees' and customers' DX.

Winning customer and employee loyalty by meeting their accelerating demands and expectations for zero-friction digital experiences is more important than ever. The key to delivering excellent digital experiences is the ability to see and understand the entire user journey with automatic context to the backend.

Dynatrace provides comprehensive digital experience monitoring that drives to the heart of the user journey. With real user monitoring, session replay, and synthetic monitoring on a unified observability and security platform, you can capitalize on the end-to-end visibility over your entire software stack to harness data from every digital touchpoint into actionable insight.