As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Chris Farrell who is the Observability and APM Strategist at Instana on how DEM is shaping enterprise IT monitoring as the adoption of Cloud and SaaS becomes increasingly widespread, and as the 'new normal' introduced by the recent pandemic creates new security vulnerabilities and performance implications. The interview is as follows:
Why is there so much interest in DEM?
In short, it’s because the connection between properly operating applications and business success continues to grow even stronger. Couple that with the ease with which a prospect or even a customer can switch to a competitor, and the need for an optimized digital experience becomes clear.
Chris Farrell, Observability and APM Strategist, Instana
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
DEM only changes enterprise IT in that it puts a hyper focus for IT on the key purpose of making technology work for its users, empowering them to get things done and do what they need effectively, efficiently and as smoothly as possible. From an application monitoring perspective, think of DEM as APM or Observability with a purpose – a purpose centered around the user.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
For Instana’s users, DEM = modern APM + automated Observability + EUM – with tools for analyzing the three pieces together in the context of end users. The final piece is the ability to create custom business dashboards centered around the users for whom the company is trying deliver the optimum digital experience.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
The first challenge for many is breaking through the traditional technology silo viewpoint to look at performance and operations from a user service delivery perspective. From a technical perspective, manually connecting all the dependencies between individual microservices, users, infrastructure is practically impossible. The DEM solution must already connect APM, EUM and Observability together since cobbling legacy monitoring tools together won’t connect all the pieces effectively.
The last challenge will be a filtering challenge – sifting through the firehose(s) of data coming into the system to recognize what needs attention – and what doesn’t – without spending too much time to figure that out. That’s where built-in Machine Learning and AIOps capabilities come into play.
