What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a business practice that helps organizations understand user interactions on their technology platforms. Users can be customers, employees, or even automated bots. DEM integrates existing tools, including end-user experience monitoring (EUEM), network monitoring, and application performance monitoring (APM), with other tools and methods to analyze user experiences from the moment they enter the organization’s domain until they leave it.

DEM is part of an IT organization’s overall observability suite that provides insight to help proactively resolve issues while driving better user experiences and informing decision makers of potential new company product and/or service offerings.

How do DEM tools work?

DEM relies on a suite of optimized tools to gather data from various sources—both internal and external—and processes that data to examine performance. These analyses help technology managers pinpoint issues that impact user experience and help drive both technology and business decisions to improve efficiency in operations and product/service offerings.

DEM tools reside throughout the technology platform, from agents on user devices to data center applications that relate to services accessed. DEM tools include traditional user experience and networking monitoring tools, plus real user monitoring (RUM), application performance monitoring (APM), and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) tools.

The results of data gathering and analyses produce a DEM score to describe the platform’s ability to deliver satisfactory services. This information proactively informs technology personnel of potential issues that can impact user experiences.

Types of DEM tools

DEM tools monitor the wide range of user interactions with the platform. Critical performance parameters that are monitored can include page loads, network latencies, traffic pathways, and more.

Synthetic transaction monitoring

Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) simulates user activities—both human and digital—on the technology platform. Scripts execute specific tasks that exercise the technology as the simulated user would for different types of interactions, such as searching for information, purchasing a product, or interacting with a digital agent. The results of STM then help inform IT and business managers how the technology platform is performing relative to its design objectives.

Read more about New Relic synthetic monitoring.

Real user monitoring

Real user monitoring (RUM) tracks a user’s real-time journey through services provided by the platform. RUM gathers data using agents on the user’s device and from instrumentation across the technology platform. RUM data can include page load times, clicks, transaction paths, and more. 

Learn more about New Relic real user monitoring. 

Application performance monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) focuses on the application layer, monitoring transaction times, measuring latencies, and tracking system health, error rates, and other parameters. The data gathered from APM provides a 360-degree view of the organization’s application stack to help identify bottlenecks in the user journey. 

Find out more about New Relic APM.

Network performance monitoring

Network performance monitoring measures network characteristics that can affect a user’s experience. These can include latencies, packet loss, bandwidth usage, and jitter. Network performance monitoring can include network diagnostics tools that many administrators are already familiar with. 

Learn more about New Relic network performance monitoring.

Endpoint monitoring

Endpoint monitoring provides a view into a user device and how it might impact the user experience. These tools evaluate hardware and software on the device that might create challenges to the overall experience.

Why are DEM solutions important?

To succeed in today’s markets, businesses need accurate data about their operations—especially when it impacts employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Experiences that delay an employee’s work or result in lost sales can be costly to an organization. 

DEM solutions provide detailed data and offer insight into how users interact with the organization’s technology platforms. Identifying early technology and experience bottlenecks can allow IT to be proactive and help companies create more efficient operations. Additionally, insight can lead to innovations and new product or service offerings.

Benefits of DEM

DEM helps organizations and their customers in a variety of ways, from creating an easier, frictionless user experience to reducing time IT spends resolving issues. 

• Improved user experience: Optimizing user experiences enables more efficient operations internally and helps drive customer satisfaction.
• Faster issue resolution: With greater insight into user devices and the technology platform’s performance, IT can proactively address issues before they become a significant challenge to the business.
• Streamlined operation: Building a DEM strategy based on effective digital experience monitoring tools and best practices, organizations can create more efficient operations, reducing IT costs.
• Critical insight for better outcomes: A data-driven organization gains greater insight into its operations and can be more effective at making decisions.

Challenges of DEM

Like integrating any performance monitoring solution into an IT infrastructure, there are also challenges to integrating DEM. IT and business managers should consider the following when making a choice. 

• Digital ecosystem complexity: The more diverse and complex the overall environment, the more challenging it can be to integrate effective monitoring tools and analyses solutions. Companies need to employ flexible digital experience monitoring solutions that easily fit into their digital ecosystem.
• Data accuracy and cleanliness: Insight comes down to the data. It needs to be precise and accurate to be able to inform IT and business managers. So, it should be selected carefully and tools tuned to gather the right data and minimize noise.
• Existing technology: Seamlessly integrating DEM tools into existing systems can be challenging depending on the age and evolution of the system, its servers, networks, and applications. DEM adoption should not result in disruption to ongoing operations.

How to create a DEM strategy

Choosing a DEM solution for your organization should involve weighing both the potential to optimize your users’ experiences and alleviate burden on IT.

Before creating a DEM strategy, companies should thoroughly assess their existing digital ecosystem, clearly define company objectives with respect to user experiences, and examine all the potential challenges they might face by adopting new technologies into their infrastructure.

From there, decision makers need to consider a DEM strategy within the confines of what’s possible within budget and timeframes. Specific goals for the overall user experience and performance expectations—such as network latencies, bandwidth availability, and page load times—should be set.

Selecting a DEM solution provider should be a collaborative effort involving key stakeholders, including IT and business group managers. Learning about the diverse range of DEM tools available can help businesses effectively assess what potential vendors offer. Demos and pilot projects can help stakeholders make the most informed decisions for integrating a DEM solution.