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Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Drives a Holistic Approach to Application Monitoring - Apica

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Drives a Holistic Approach to Application Monitoring - Apica

As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Sven Hammar who is the Chief Product Officer of Apica and Troy Presley, Apica Synthetic Monitoring's Product Owner 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?

Digital experience monitoring isn’t new, and there are many ways for enterprises to use it depending on IT and business needs. The one unifying challenge, in all cases, is finding the right combination of technologies that will not only meet customers’ expectations, but also help transform the way digital experiences are delivered. With so much riding on the quality of digital experiences, monitoring those experiences has become a critical part of any business’s success.

Sven Hammar, Chief Product Officer, Apica

Building a monitoring strategy that provides meaningful and actionable information about applications has always been challenging. As new data analysis technologies and methods have emerged, the market focus has swung back and forth several times between monitoring solutions aimed at infrastructure and those solutions aimed at monitoring the client side.

In truth, a well-rounded monitoringstrategy will always include multiple views into application performance. The ongoing trends towards more complex applications which take advantage of micro-services, remote dependencies, and continuous delivery have put a spotlight on the importance of getting a fuller picture than any single strategy can provide. The shift to Digital Experience Monitoring is understanding application monitoring in a much more wholistic approach.

How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?

The core technologies and solutions included in DEM are not new. It is primarily the tighter integration and correlation between the different aspects of application monitoring that is important. When both internal and customer facing applications routinely depend on dozens or hundreds of separate local or remote services, and when many of those services are developed by separate teams and deployed as needed, traditional monitoring becomes too challenging. Even experienced enterprises can easily become overwhelmed with data, but with limited ability to make sense of it or act on it quickly.

Troy Presley, Apica Synthetic Monitoring Product Owner

By treating monitoring information from both APM, Synthetic Transactions and End Point Monitoring as separate parts of a single view into application performance, enterprises can gain much more visibility into changes and problems. This allows enterprises to easily track problems back to their source so they can be fixed quicker. An effective DEM solution looks at the application as a whole, from multiple directions, and provides meaningful insights into the overall experience that users of the application can expect. This type of solution can come in the form of a single vendor or product, but for large enterprises it will more likely be a well-thought-out combination of multiple products integrated together in one cohesive, meaningful, and actionable view of application status.

What are your key solutions for DEM?

As a premier provider of enterprise synthetic monitoring solutions for the largest and most complex of enterprise use cases, Apica remains focused on delivering innovative solutions to the client-side monitoring portion of the DEM landscape. These include the most advanced and configurable browser-based monitoring agents, an industry-leading URL / API based scripting tool, powerful desktop application for legacy non http applications, and the ability to quickly build custom monitoring to match our customers' needs.

Apica's products integrate with the leading complementary enterprise tools in the APM, BI, and IMS spaces. With the increasing importance of fully integrated DEM solutions, Apica has increased its focus on improving and deepening our existing integrations. By adding additional functionality this helps contextualize and link related data and events for a full monitoring solution.

Synthetic transaction monitoring combined with API backend quality monitoring, provides a holistic view of uptime as well as highlighting regional network problems affecting the user experience. With the impact of social media and online interactions, not having timely information about an application’s user experience will quickly and negatively affect a company’s reputation.

Today organizations depend on external and internal APIs, and without effective monitoring of these transactions from both inside and out, you won’t have the knowledge you need to quickly resolve user experience issues. Additionally, it’s nearly impossible to monitor third party dependencies without the API dimension.

What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?

One of the biggest challenges are making the value and advantages of a good DEM solution apparent. For many enterprises, monitoring is a necessity but knowing and building out the right amount of coverage can be difficult to pinpoint. Deploying a full DEM solution is costly and complex in both time and money, and it is on us as solution providers to show that the benefits on the other side of those costs are more than worth the effort.

Traditional approaches deliver less monitoring coverage and not enough depth into these types of applications. Without dedicated synthetic traffic, it is hard to differentiate real problems from internal failovers, or vice versa, leading to situations where internal monitoring is showing green lights, but users still can’t log-on. The more complex the applications become, the more problem for traditional monitoring to not reflect the reality of your users’ experiences.

Another challenge we see is with security. Organization’s security and compliance teams are very hesitant to have 3rd party RUM code embedded into applications because of the risk of gathering sensitive data. As a result, synthetics is heavily used as a proxy for user behavior, along with the basic availability and performance metrics. To use synthetics, credentials to access these applications need to be highly secured, often time even needed to access via Multifactor Authentication. Apica offers a unique advantage with our advanced scripting technologies to secure and manage these credentials both internally and external to an organization.

Author

Apica has been a leading application performance company since 2005. It was founded out of the need to ensure that enterprises can deliver high quality application performance and user experience while maintaining speed, visibility and control in the delivery process. Apica’s performance monitoring platform includes global synthetic monitoring enhanced with comprehensive scripting and load testing capabilities to quality assure user experience.

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