It’s been five years since Gartner introduced a new term to the IT world - Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), an evolution of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM). Though it has received subtle tweaks over the years, the core tenets of Gartner’s definition of DEM remain essentially the same:
"Digital experience monitoring technologies monitor the availability, performance and quality of an end user or digital agent experiences when using a device or application. This can include employees and customers, though end customers (such as patrons of a retail website) are more often covered by application performance monitoring (APM) tools."
For several years now, the final component of that definition has held especially true. All it takes is a simple Google search to discover that traditional APM tools dominate the monitoring space. Despite the rapid technological advancement since DEM emerged as a new IT category, many organizations still heavily rely on APM tools in their efforts to provide optimal digital experiences for their customers and workforce. There are reasons why this raises alarm bells, but first, we need to discuss what prompted the need for DEM tools in the first place.
It’s all about the end users!
In an age where brands and products are measured by how satisfied customers are, every user experience matters. It's no secret that today’s consumer is less patient. If your website is slow to load or unavailable - they will leave, and not quietly. In the old days, an unsatisfactory customer experience or a complaint was typically kept between the customer and the company. Nowadays, such incidents are dissected and disseminated on social media platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and their virality amplifies their impact 100,000 times over.
The same goes for employees. Hybrid work doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time fast. If your distributed workforce can’t connect, they can’t work. And poor productivity isn’t just bad for your bottom line; it’s terrible for morale. So if your workforce is continually experiencing digital friction or having worse digital experiences than your customers, eventually, they will leave. And when they do, they’ll share their story on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter - you can see how that could be detrimental to your company's image.
That’s what made DEM more than just another trendy buzzword - it articulated a genuine, indisputable necessity: the need to put user experience at the front and center of IT operations. Ironically, this is the very area where APM falls short.
The Internet is the new network.
While the advantages of APM are widely recognized, the fact that it originates from the time of monolithic applications means that it may not always be the best fit for the specific needs of contemporary architectures.Gone are the days when all IT systems were on the local area network (LAN), and everything was hosted under one roof, with enterprises just having to worry about end users being able to reach their data centers.
Today we’re at a critical moment in technology - the Internet has become the foundation for everything, the backbone for virtually all operations. The proliferation of microservices, open-source technologies, and cloud-native environments has made it increasingly difficult to perform APM effectively.
For example, in a cloud-native environment, applications may be composed of many small, independent services that communicate over APIs and run on ephemeral infrastructure. This can make it difficult to trace the flow of data and identify performance bottlenecks, which are crucial for effective APM. Additionally, traditional APM tools may not be able to handle the high volume and velocity of data generated by cloud-native applications, making it difficult to gain meaningful insights.
Weighing on the subject, Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring states, “traditional monitoring technologies, such as APM or NPM, can fill some needs but leave visibility gaps, such as internet routing, DNS, CDN and edge infrastructure.”
That’s why today, comprehensive DEM is more effectively provided by solutions that employ Internet Synthetics to look beyond the Application Stack into the new Internet Stack that every organization needs to monitor.
What is the Internet Stack
The Internet Stack is a highly complex and interconnected system, consisting of various components such as applications, microservices, routing protocols, data centers or cloud providers, DNS providers and APIs, and external network delivery mechanisms like fiber, broadband, local ISPs, and mobile networks.
While conventional APM tools are great for optimizing the performance of applications (tracing, discovery, and diagnostics) they do not address core Internet services such as BGP, CDN, and DNS, as well as Internet protocols and external network delivery systems. It takes the coordinated effort of multiple stakeholders across the Internet Stack to load a single page on the Internet. While effective, the Internet Stack is also extremely fragile and continually changing. A routing problem or API malfunction, among other vulnerabilities, can trigger a chain reaction resulting in latency or even complete outages.
Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM)
Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) was created to address this crucial need for comprehensive monitoring, providing meaningful insights into every aspect of the Internet Stack to prevent potential blind spots and catch incidents before they impact business operations. Internet Synthetics go beyond the traditional synthetic monitoring of purely web and APIs, allowing you to monitor performance from the end-user perspective.
Why is this important? Well, let's take the use case of monitoring for reachability. Most reachability issues today are caused by ISP peering issues, BGP leaks, or BGP flapping issues - basically network instability. IPM allows you to monitor BGP in real-time, meaning you’ll know why users can’t reach your site – even when your internal monitoring is “all green.”
That ability to monitor from where your users are naturally pays dividends in workforce experience. Suppose one of your employees is working from a cafe in London and can’t connect to the MS Teams meeting. With an endpoint on their device, you’ll be able to tell if the problem is with their laptop, their Wi-Fi, the local ISP, or the nearest CDN. The same principle applies to customer experience. While you can’t put an endpoint on every customer’s laptop or mobile phone, you can get crucial information from the nearest node to that user.
The future of DEM
What’s the future of DEM? Is APM doomed? Absolutely not. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly common for businesses to use both APM and IPM to ensure the smooth operation of their Application and Internet Stacks, respectively. There is no reason why these two approaches cannot be used in conjunction.
When evaluating DEM solutions, it's essential to seek out options that offer proactive visibility into business-critical applications and systems throughout your enterprise with the help of enterprise nodes. Additionally, consider solutions that monitor reachability, availability, reliability, and performance from crucial Internet locations, spanning top-tier last mile, backbone, wireless, cloud, and multi-access edge computing providers.
In today's business landscape, the significance of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) cannot be emphasized enough. With the internet continuing to serve as our primary network, resilience is of utmost importance. By carefully considering and choosing the right DEM solutions, businesses can proactively monitor their digital experience, improve their overall resilience, and stay ahead in today's competitive marketplace.
