Synthetic Monitoring and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is an approach that uses the end-user's point of view to assess and optimize usage and performance of digital services, applications, and websites. It is a relatively new "functional dimension" of application performance monitoring (APM), which, according to Gartner, entails STM or synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) for both mobile- and web-based end users.

Organizations use digital experience monitoring software to identify and track traffic, monitor user behavior, and keep an eye on several other application- or website-specific elements to develop a better understanding of the usability and performance of their products. DEM products merge real user monitoring and simulated traffic monitoring to evaluate both real-user experience and theoretical performance.

Who Needs DEM?

With the majority of modern-day consumers preferring to transact digitally or at least interact digitally with a business before transacting, there has been a growing need for businesses to develop a robust online presence. Virtually every business is online now, and going digital is not the masterstroke it used to be anymore. The playing field has been leveled, and extra steps are needed to separate the great from the good. One of those steps is adopting a DEM strategy.

DEM applications help businesses find useful insights into application and website performance as well as user behavior. As stated above, most businesses have mobile applications and websites now, and digital customers have a vast range of options to choose from. Besides your website being resourceful, they need it to be straightforward and easy to maneuver. The pages should load quickly and the links should be easy to locate.

A study shows that businesses suffer an estimated 7% decline in web conversations with every second of delay. What's more, a whopping 75% of prospects will seek alternatives elsewhere if a business website crashes, lags, or is too slow when they are using it.

With this, it's clear that customers are using websites and applications to judge brands. A few years ago it was about having excellent services and complementing it with a website. That's not the case anymore. Now it is about having a good site or mobile application and backing it up with quality services.

The Benefits of Implementing a DEM Strategy

Having a digital experience monitoring tool offers the following benefits to the organization:

1. It helps you brace up for change. In the foreseeable future, non-human users are projected to topple humans as the primary users of applications. Your conventional monitoring tools may not be designed for this. Having a DEM in place will help you tell the difference between human users and non-human users and monitor each differently. You will then use the findings to optimize your application or website with both humans and non-humans in mind.
2. It helps you monitor mobile users. The bulk of internet users these days access websites via mobile phones. A DEM software will help improve mobile experience by tracking both the application and the APIs it relies on.
3. It will help you monitor protocols. Contemporary applications require more than just one protocol to function correctly. By including the protocols you are using in your DEM strategy, you can understand which ones you need more and what changes you need to make to optimize application delivery.

Using Synthetic Monitoring in your DEM strategy

Synthetic monitoring complements real-user monitoring (RUM) by issuing automated transactions that simulate clients and their expected actions on a website or app. The technique can be applied both inside and outside the firewall to ensure systems are working properly and to provide crucial information on the application's performance respectively.

Unlike RUM, synthetic monitoring lets you keep track of the performance of your application and server even when the traffic is too low to make credible inferences. It may also come in handy for developers or organizations that need to test new applications or capabilities before rolling them out. Here are more reasons why you should implement synthetic monitoring:

1. It lets you detect problems ahead of your users. Whether or not your application is already in use, synthetic monitoring can help you identify current and imminent performance issues before any of your users does. Synthetic monitoring is designed to monitor websites, APIs, mobile applications, and SaaS applications at all times and report problems whether or not they have been encountered by actual users.
2. It allows for benchmarking and baselining. Synthetic monitoring can help you establish the "average performance" of your application to different clients in different locations over time. You can then be able to detect trivial issues that are adding up to impact the usability of your website or app in a big way in the long run.
3. It helps you brace up for market and season changes. As stated earlier, synthetic monitoring is the only DEM technique that can be applied on applications and features that have not been tried out yet. Let's say you are planning to launch a new marketing campaign that aims to direct users to areas of your website or application that have never experienced real user traffic before. Synthetic monitoring will give you an idea of what the users can expect and help you optimize performance ahead of the very first real-user visit.
4. It helps you measure and abide by service level agreements. An SLA is a contract between a service provider and a user that defines the standard or level of service that the service provider guarantees the user. Synthetic monitoring can help you understand your new application better and set up more realistic and achievable SLAs.

Summary

The best business decisions are made when an organization views and understands its service from the end user's point of view. Digital experience monitoring helps you anticipate and track user actions in real-time and make performance inferences and changes where necessary. Both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring can be useful depending on your application and what you want to achieve. Get in touch with us today for more information on digital experience monitoring and to request a free trial of our synthetic monitoring tool.