What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

How Does End User Experience Monitoring Work?

EUEM offers functionality beyond typical network monitoring software. It’s an IT service more closely aligned with application performance management, but focused on the overall health of the user experience, as the name suggests. It helps IT teams monitor experiences with real-time analytics, automated remediation, an experience management dashboard, and employee sentiment data.

Think of EUEM as a type of load balancing software that aims to help an organization quickly mitigate and resolve any user experience issues.

Types of End User Experience Monitoring

Many EUEM tools play unique roles in improving real-time observability for IT. Some of these tools include:

• Application performance monitoring (APM) (includes web application and mobile app monitoring)
• JavaScript injection
• End user monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Transaction monitoring
• API monitoring

All these forms of monitoring allow IT teams to run diagnostics, perform root cause analysis, fix performance issues on the backend to reduce bottlenecks, latency, and load times, and shorten response times.

How Can End User Experience Monitoring Help Your Business?

Now that user experience metrics are a key performance indicator for enterprises, IT leaders need measurements beyond the typical response time, availability, and uptime. The post-pandemic workforce will remain more distributed and remote, limiting IT leaders’ visibility into endpoint, connectivity, and application performance. This leaves organizations vulnerable to issues that are beyond their control, such as those originating with an internet service provider (ISP) or home Wi-Fi.

Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring defines new EUEM technologies as providing “visibility into the end user experience (which applies to external customers as well as employees) as they interact with applications and related resources. These resources are increasingly cloud-based, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), but many maintain on-premises components as well. End-user experience monitoring spans infrastructure, applications, and business processes to enable a comprehensive view of end-user experiences and translate them into business outcomes.”

Why Do You Need End User Experience Monitoring?

In the traditional network model, where employees connect to the network to gain access to applications in the data center, it’s easy to monitor issues or outages because IT owns all the systems and tools they need visibility into. However, in today’s environments, you’re more likely to find employees working remotely and connecting to SaaS applications—such as Microsoft 365, Workday, Salesforce, and Zoom—or internal applications residing in public and private clouds.

These environments may also have SAP applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle databases in Azure. Each of these services provides its own performance monitoring, which creates silos of information. The increased use of these cloud-delivered services and the dramatic rise in bring your own device (BYOD) and remote work leave traditional monitoring tools with no visibility into the paths between end users and the applications they access.

Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring notes that "SaaS providers’ monitoring of their own services fails to provide visibility of performance or experience from the user’s perspective, leaving customers in the dark and putting the organization’s business at risk. They are often late in admitting a failure that has already caused user impact.”

To this end, organizations need actionable performance metrics related to the end user experience. Instrumentation—the ability to gather network, application, or system data—is a big challenge when applications sit in the cloud and users sit outside the network perimeter. With the internet as the corporate network and the cloud as the data center, legacy monitoring tools can’t see what they can’t instrument.

Benefits of End User Experience Monitoring

End user experience monitoring solutions adapt to the new ways of work to deliver a better visibility model by providing:

• Uninterrupted, end-to-end visibility into the end user device, network path, and application performance for comprehensive user experience insights
• Improved mean time to detection (MTTD) and remediation (MTTR) to reduce the cost of application downtime
• The ability to proactively detect, troubleshoot, and diagnose end user experience issues
• A unified view of endpoint metrics and events

With the help of an EUEM platform, you can increase user satisfaction, decrease page load times, and even improve customer experiences. The next step, then, is to seek out the best EUEM platform for your organization.

Many vendors offer “unified” EUEM solutions that are “built for the cloud,” but most of these end up being virtualized point products that only add complexity and cost.

You need a proven cloud native platform that seamlessly integrates into your existing environment, so you can start improving experiences tomorrow—Zscaler Digital Experience is that platform.

How Zscaler Monitors End User Experience

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 in your organization, from every device they use, without the need to deploy multiple point products. It gives you a unified view that allows you to identify end user device, network path, or application issues so you can remediate them and get back to fostering your digital business.

ZDX:

• Benchmarks and monitors the experience of all your end users from every device they use
• Provides a company-, location-, and department-wide view of experience
• Uses a proven agent (Zscaler Client Connector) as the single app for all Zscaler capabilities
• Offers full-path visualization and monitoring for SaaS and custom apps
• Leverages the Zscaler global cloud for monitoring; protects your IPs from denylisting; and measures your performance against peers so you can see if others in your region are experiencing similar issues

Other EUEM providers haven’t built their products for the cloud, so they’re only suitable for legacy on-premises use cases. ZDX leverages the Zero Trust Exchange, the world’s largest inline security platform built for the cloud, to optimize monitoring behavior. It uses a proven agent, Zscaler Client Connector, that runs on millions of devices today. ZDX can be set up in a few hours, with no need to deploy any additional hardware, software, or massive storage clusters to store reams of raw, low-quality alerts.