As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Jasmin Young who is the CEO of Netreo 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 (DEM) measures the availability, performance and quality of endpoint, connectivity and application user experiences from everywhere - so companies can quickly troubleshoot and remediate problems (e.g. ISP or home Wi-Fi issues). The 3 key reasons for the increased interest are (a) rise of SaaS applications, (b) increased need for quality access and (c) desire to assess business outcomes across people, processes and platforms.
(a) Applications: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (such as Zoom, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce) are becoming more prevalent for companies of all sizes. However, these applications can sometimes go offline (e.g. Microsoft 365 outages in September/ October).
(b) Access: Companies are working in even more distributed and remote scenarios (WFH) - and the need to monitor VPN, internet and application (e.g. Zoom) sessions have increased.
(c) Assess: Business and technical stakeholders, who are running digital businesses, would like end-to-end and omnichannel views of their business to understand how users are experiencing their brands - across web and mobile platforms.
Jasmin Young, CEO, Netreo
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
DEM shifts the focus from what is being monitored into who is being impacted and why. It extends the monitoring of the digital supply chain (resources and applications) to the user’s point of view - and enables insights into the impact that degraded performance can have on productivity, revenue generation, and customer loyalty (such as user engagement, customer satisfaction, and quality of experience).
What are your key solutions for DEM?
Netreo monitors the availability, performance and quality of the digital heartbeat, so that companies have confidence in their digital businesses. Netreo does this in 3 key ways: Synthetic Transaction Monitoring, End-Point Monitoring and Real-User Monitoring.
(a) Synthetic Transaction Monitoring.
- Emulates how a user might send an email or engage, for example, with a shopping cart in an E-Commerce application. The entire transaction is timed and monitored for performance metrics.
(b) End-point Monitoring.
- Provides Points of Presence (POP) from data centers located around the world for an international digital heartbeat, while aggregating them into a single UI for reporting and dashboarding purposes.
- Provides “Remote Service Engines" (RSE) from customers’ own POP. Netreo enables customers with the flexibility to set RSEs anywhere they need (e.g. for web applications only accessible via corporate WANwork) -- to increase visibility and facilitate local metric collection and synthetic transactions.
(c) Real-user monitoring.
- Provides endpoint-based agents from users to run synthetic transactions *from the perspective* of that user on that computer (from a home office, a coffee shop patio, or anywhere the user can find an Internet connection)
- Enables SaaS Service Level Agreement monitoring (e.g. Microsoft 365) through tools like Netreo’s Microsoft 365 Insight.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
Companies will typically need to overcome challenges across people, process and technology:
(a) People
- Strategically, working across business and technology stakeholders to identify the right processes and performance indicators can be complex. Netreo mitigates this by structuring engagements with key goals, and then considering supporting processes, data needs and technology resources
- Tactically, end-users may need to assist in the installation of the agents for monitoring. Netreo mitigates this through automated install scripts and strict access control of devices.
(b) Process
- Strategically, end-user experience monitoring is typically carried out on an application-by-application basis, with different data ingestion technologies used for different applications. Netreo mitigates this by triangulating observations and understanding across multiple data ingestion technologies, to ensure cross-channel measurement of the user / agent experience.
- Tactically, DEM is sometimes deployed in isolation (such as to monitor only the front-end user experience) which minimizes its impact. Netreo mitigates this as an integrated platform that can associate context and data sharing with its monitoring capabilities
(c) Technology
- Strategically, “Yet Another Tool” (YAT) contributes to IT tool bloat, especially if it is only a boutique DEM solution. Netreo's solution mitigates this risk as it’s platform has embedded DEM capabilities.
- Tactically, more data from multiple sources often results in more noise. Netreo's DEM capabilities are integrated into the overall solution, so they carry with them the same advantages found in our other features: templatable configuration, intelligent and actionable alert generation, and long term retention (3 years) to separate signal from noise - and offer more agility in analytical options and reporting.
