What Is Digital Experience Monitoring?

How Does Digital Experience Monitoring Work?

DEM solutions give IT administrators a dashboard on which to view performance data and metrics regarding the health and efficiency of their environments. DEM tools are effective for monitoring web applications, APIs, and mobile apps, and they help organizations improve digital experience management for the user journey and customer journey.

Why Is Digital Experience Monitoring Important?

Digital experience monitoring provides deep insight into end user experience, proactively monitoring performance and pinpointing issues in the local network, on an end user’s device, with your ISP, or in your data center or SaaS applications (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, etc.). Some of the functions of DEM tools include:

• Active and passive monitoring, benchmarking, and measuring digital experiences for every end user in your organization
• Monitoring SaaS and cloud and private applications using HTTP, ICMP, or UDP protocols and running on end user devices
• Collecting real-time device health information (CPU percentage, memory usage, Network IO, Disk IO, Wi-Fi signal strength, etc.) for end user devices
• Hop-by-hop network path visualization from the endpoint to the application
• Remote troubleshooting to isolate and resolve end user IT issues

Digital Experience Monitoring vs. Network Monitoring

Network performance monitoring tools have been around as long as networks themselves. They were sufficient when you owned and controlled everything from the endpoints to the network to the applications running on your own on-premises hardware in your data center.

In those days, tools that relied on SNMP, NetFlow, network-based PCAPs, or DSCP markings were enough to get predictable network performance and troubleshoot any performance issues. But these domain-centric monitoring tools don’t provide visibility into all the issues that can impact end user experience, particularly as today’s hybrid workforces move on and off the network, and as ever more apps and services move to the cloud.

As a result, most issues are discovered through users’ helpdesk reports—far from the optimal scenario where they’re detected and remediated before users notice a problem in the first place.

Types of Digital Experience Monitoring Tools

Various DEM tools play distinct roles in improving observability for IT, including:

• Application performance monitoring (APM), which detects and analyzes performance issues in software applications
• Real user monitoring (RUM), which collects data on user interactions with a website or cloud application
• End user experience monitoring (EUEM), which monitors and assesses from users’ point of view as they interact with IT services
• Synthetic monitoring (a.k.a. synthetic transaction monitoring [STM]), which uses simulated user traffic to test the experience on a website, app, etc.
• DevOps monitoring, which includes health checks and performance tracking throughout the DevOps life cycle to support better software development

All of these allow IT teams to run diagnostics, perform root cause analysis, and fix performance issues on the backend to reduce remediation and response times and improve business outcomes.

Benefits of Digital Experience Monitoring

Digital experience monitoring have a lot to offer any organization, regardless of size or industry. Let’s examine some of the key business benefits:

• Increased agility and collaboration: DEM offers increased visibility to help desktop, security, network, and helpdesk operations teams provide improved user experiences alongside more efficient triage and resolution, in line with today’s digital transformation initiatives.
• Improved productivity: To empower users to stay productive, it’s key to see and understand both user behavior and the user journey. Deploying the right experience monitoring tools in tandem with an effective DEM strategy will help you reduce downtime and outages.
• Reduced complexity and cost: Giving IT professionals a single pane of glass to look through for digital experiences helps you reduce reliance on costly, complex point monitoring solutions that only serve to create confusion.
• Operational simplicity: IT operations are simplified when visibility is increased across the entire ecosystem. With the help of effective DEM technology, issues can be resolved much more quickly and your ITOps team is free to focus on more productive tasks.
• Increased customer satisfaction: DEM solutions aren’t only effective for monitoring your network and end users—they can be deployed to ensure quality customer experiences as well. Understanding how your customers are seeing your website gives you an upper hand against your competition.

Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring

Many popular digital experience monitoring solutions come in the form of siloed point products, which means they tend to:

• Leave blind spots caused by disparate reporting, lack of integration, and more
• Force your team to manually correlate across multiple point solutions
• Require tedious maintenance due to having multiple agents
• Cause alert fatigue and no offer actionable insights
• Lack cloud nativity and functionality

To fill this gap, a number of vendors now offer “unified” DEM solutions purportedly built for the cloud. Many of these solutions are simply collections of virtualized point products, however, and although they don’t give you new hardware to manage, they nonetheless add complexity and costs in the form of multiple subscriptions, integration management, and so on.

Many DEM providers’ products weren’t built for the cloud, and as such only suit legacy on-premises use cases. To begin improving user experiences for your modern workforce today—and to do it efficiently, affordably, and without requiring changes to your existing environment—you need a proven, fully integrated cloud native platform.

The Zscaler Digital Experience Monitoring Solution

Zscaler Digital Experience™ (ZDX™) is a cloud-delivered digital experience monitoring service, part of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™. ZDX measures end user experience for every user, on any device, without the need to deploy multiple point products. With its unified view end user device, network path, and application issues, you can quickly identify and remediate problems and get back to enabling your digital business.

With ZDX, you can:

• Get unrivaled visibility into end user experience: Get end-to-end visibility from users’ devices, over multiple networks, to their apps and services—even those not in your control.
• Detect problems before users are impacted: Expose network latency, user device issues, or application performance problems along with their root causes.
• Consolidate your digital experience monitoring: See it all in a single pane of glass that gathers and correlates performance metrics from user devices, networks, and apps.
• Ensure apps and networks are healthy: Monitor data center, cloud, and SaaS for availability and performance to ensure that your users experience uninterrupted service.

In conjunction with Zscaler Client Connector, ZDX leverages the Zero Trust Exchange—the world’s largest inline security platform built for the cloud—to optimize monitoring. ZDX can be set up in a few hours, with no need to deploy additional hardware.