As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to John Worthington who is the Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations 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 management has everything to do with 'experience' as it does with 'digital'. When your digital application is slow how do your customers feel? Interest in DEM is driven by pervasive use of technology, and our desire to have that technology actually work for us; to make our lives simpler and easier. It has become key to competitiveness in the digital world.
John Worthington, Director, Customer Success, eG Innovations
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
In some respects it hasn't changed at all. One of the most difficult questions IT has always had to answer is 'why is my application slow?’ and that hasn't gotten any easier over the years, in spite of–or perhaps because of–advances in technology.
Perhaps the biggest shift is IT is recognizing that monitoring technical domains is never going to assure performance from an end user perspective. So, every vendor is focused on making the end user the focus of monitoring, and that's a good thing.
But there's still a lot that happens beneath the iceberg, regardless of the underlying technologies and deployment models–cloud or otherwise. A therein lies the rub. Achieving total performance visibility is not trivial.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
eG Innovations has been pioneering unified monitoring for two decades. Our flagship product, eG Enterprise, takes measurements at every layer of every component of a digital business service, uses machine learning to learn the norms of all measurements, and a patented data flow and dependency-based analytics to automatically isolate which layer of which component is the source of a performance anomaly.
An interesting by-product we've seen is that by capturing each end-to-end user journey across every layer of every component and being able to add business context–such as what you've added to a shopping cart, or a user survey score, or process ID; any business context–you're able to really start connecting the dots between customers, business and technology.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
I think the biggest challenge will be cultural. Monitoring is a wicked problem, and it's not the technology that will trip you up; it's more likely that people will. We are still very attached to our technical domains and organizational silos.
