A practical guide to digital experience monitoring (DEM)

First, let’s clarify — what is digital experience? It’s the way your users (customers, partners, employees, etc.) interact with your applications to accomplish their goals.

Digital experience monitoring is ensuring that users’ digital experiences are quick and efficient. It’s about making sure the technology that your team provides is running smoothly from your users’ point of view, so they have a great experience interacting with your business or service. 

Digital experience gets complicated when your applications connect to other applications, services, and databases and run on multiple devices, across multiple domains, on multiple networks, under variable workloads. You may not even have any control over the myriad of technologies your apps depend on.

Your users have no idea how complicated it is — and they don’t care.

Imagine the buyer’s journey on a mobile retail app. A customer starts by browsing, logging in, searching. Straightforward enough, right? But after they add items to their cart, the complexity begins when multiple backend processes spin up. 

APIs connect cart functions to third-party payment gateways. Java servlets manage requests and responses between the user’s browser and the server. Databases store and retrieve data such as user information, inventory, transaction details. Performance may slow waaaay down. Eyeballs roll and shopping carts are abandoned.

In short, what seems simple from a user's perspective is actually a complex system that supports every function needed to ensure products are in stock, available, ready to ship, and purchasable. The checkout process — comprised of multiple steps and apps — needs to be easy, fast, and secure.

We often describe a great user experience as a frictionless or seamless user experience because that means all the components and technologies supporting the user journey are working together perfectly. No glitches, no waiting for page loads, no eyes rolling, no abandoned transactions.

Users expect your applications to work seamlessly on any device, anytime, anywhere. They don’t care about the complexity of your environment — they just want an easy, glitch-free digital experience.

However, delivering that experience, everywhere, every time, is challenging, and sometimes impossible. DEM to the rescue! 

With DEM, you can analyze application mapping, profile transactions to monitor performance, and gain code-level insights across a distributed environment of servers, databases, caches, queues, third-party services, and even a labyrinth of ethernet cables. Okay, that last one was just a test to see if you were paying attention. You passed.

The point is that this comprehensive visibility helps ensure a great user experience from login to checkout (or transaction completed, ticket purchased, claim submitted, etc.).

Additionally, DEM can enable you to: 

• Reveal issues within application components, infrastructure, or networks that interfere with users’ experiences. 
• Understand how users are interacting with your applications — you may be surprised. 
• Improve the user journey to boost business metrics.
• Find and fix issues due to unusually heavy workloads.
• Design and test backup plans to keep experiences seamless, even during maintenance.
• Figure out what is causing delays and drop-offs so you can add helpful tips where needed.

Frictionless or zero-friction experiences often translate to great experiences. Customers get what they want without eye rolling, rage clicking, or digital blisters. 

According to The App Attention Index 2023¹, consumers have increasingly higher expectations for digital experiences:

• 62% want much more from these experiences now than two years ago.
• 88% struggled with application performance issues in the past year. 
• 70% warned others not to use an app after just one bad experience. 

One and done!? Don’t let your users abandon you. Use DEM so they don’t get to that point. 

DEM helps organizations support key goals while improving user interactions. 

DEM in action: AutoNation proactively addresses digital experience issues

AutoNation, the largest automotive retailer in the U.S., faced challenges in delivering a seamless digital experience across various online and offline touchpoints. They needed to ensure their applications were always available and performing well to support business operations and customer interactions. By deploying Cisco AppDynamics, AutoNation gained end-to-end visibility into application performance and user experience, which allows them to monitor key metrics and proactively address issues before they can affect customers. Read more.

“AppDynamics provides a common view across our AWS, Azure and on-premises applications, databases and server infrastructure delivering real-time, actionable insights based on transactions that help us improve our customers’ experiences.” – Keith Kelly, chief architect, AutoNation

Research shows that today’s “application generation” (people who grew up on their smartphones and want to transact with your business quickly, efficiently, and online) demands the very best and most secure digital experiences. 

When you learn about issues from bad reviews of your app or complaints to your help desk, it’s too late: damage is already done with at least one user who is unhappy.

When you don’t monitor user experience, finding and fixing issues is often difficult, costly, and time-consuming. Consider an unmonitored glitch tied to a revenue-generating transaction where hundreds or thousands of customers are impacted. Prolonged discovery and triage could devastate your bottom line.

DEM in action: How Carhartt delivers frictionless customer experiences

Carhartt, a manufacturer of premium workwear, experienced a growth surge that required a digital transformation to meet online shopping demand. With Cisco AppDynamics DEM solutions, it reduced overhead, achieved 360-degree visibility across its IT environment, and saved millions by preventing services outages. Read more.

“The cost of an hour of downtime anywhere in our environment can reach into the millions of dollars in lost revenue. Cisco AppDynamics helps us visualize the key components of our environment and prioritize issues by the impact they’ll have on the business and our customers so we’re using our limited time and resources more productively.” – Tim Masey, VP, IT infrastructure and security, Carhartt 

Users can quit using your applications or website for any number of issues — big or small. Common problems like code errors, slow page loads, broken links, latency, and infrastructure issues cause churn. Sometimes more than a business can withstand. 

DEM helps protect and enhance the user experience and drive satisfaction, so you build loyalty and revenue.

Reasons users jump ship from your applications — which you can avoid with DEM — include: 

1. Complete service outages — the hard fail

The disaster: IT service management (ITSM) organizations typically have service-level objectives (SLOs) for critical digital services, such as SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) or shopping cart checkout. When a critical service outage impacts the network, infrastructure, APIs, or an application, it disrupts user experience, which can impact the bottom line. 

DEM to the rescue: In production environments, use DEM to avoid and/or minimize outages with the visibility you need into real-time user experiences to find and fix issues fast. In test environments, use DEM to identify and address potential points of failure before you release an application or new feature.

DEM in action: Royal Caribbean prevents costly outages 

Downtime at Royal Caribbean, the largest global cruise line, can cost $1 million an hour .— one big reason their applications always need to be available and performing optimally. By deploying Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes, Royal Caribbean gained end-to-end visibility across a complex service delivery supply chain, including application performance and user experience. This integration allows them to monitor key metrics and proactively address issues before they can lead to costly outages and subpar user experiences.  Read more.

“The value AppDynamics and ThousandEyes have brought to us managing the call center, for example, is that I now have full-stack observability, not only from the application experience, but also visibility across the network experience. Now, I see everything. I see all the touchpoints and the failure points causing bottlenecks.” – Alice McElroy, director of operational excellence, Royal Caribbean Group

2. Loss of functionality along critical user journeys

The disaster: Imagine you’re trying to make a purchase online, but the "Add to Cart" button won’t work. Or you’re filling out a form, and the "Submit" button is unresponsive. Frustrating, no? These hiccups can happen at any stage in the customer journey, from browsing to checkout, and they leave users annoyed and ready to bail. Like with service outages, this poor user experience can damage a brand and hurt the bottom line. 

DEM to the rescue: Use DEM to quickly catch and fix these issues to maintain a smooth and frustration-free user journey. Use synthetic testing to discover and fix glitches before users find them.

DEM in action: easyJet offers a turbulence-free customer journey

To be the warmest welcome in the sky, easyJet needs to maintain a seamless user experience across their digital platforms and ensure smooth operations for booking flights and managing travel plans. The combined Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes solution gives them the real-time visibility they need to find and fix application issues fast, ensuring digital interactions are consistently efficient and reliable, even during peak times. Read more. 

“With Cisco Full-Stack Observability, we have gained real-time insight and control over our observability data, which means we can keep enhancing our services for employees and travelers alike.” – Simon Challis, platform lead - observability and AIOps, easyJet

3. When your technology “kind of” works 

The disaster: Sometimes, your technology doesn’t fail completely but still annoys users. Think slow page loads, intrusive pop-ups, auto-playing videos, mobile navigation issues, or buttons that are hard to click. These aren’t full outages but still harm the user experience and may lead to lost business. No wonder we keep hearing "slow is the new down."

DEM to the rescue: Use DEM to monitor these issues in real-time, record the user journey, and identify areas for improvement. Keep an eye on core web vitals to ensure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability are up to user standards. You can turn “kind of” working tech into a seamless experience.  

Furthermore, you can use DEM to turn “kind of” working and “good enough” digital experiences into exceptional digital experiences that improve business and drive more revenue.

DEM in action: Admiral Insurance 

Admiral Insurance, a leading UK-based financial service provider, sought to understand the digital experience of its nine million customers across a complex, multi-cloud environment. With end-to-end visibility across its infrastructure enabled by Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes, Admiral established a two-hour SLA on resolving any application or network downtime — significantly faster than the industry standard of four hours!

“Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes are incredibly useful for us. It takes us straight to the root cause of an issue.” – Luke Erickson, head of IT service operations, Admiral Insurance

Implementation complexity

DEM on its own can tell you if a digital service is up and running, but it can’t always explain why it’s down or exactly what’s broken. For the complete picture, you need to integrate with other tools like application performance monitoring (APM) or network/internet monitoring.

When a DEM solution is built on siloed tools, implementation becomes very complex, especially if each tool requires its own overhead. Separate IT teams must manually correlate data from separate tools and business units to map user experience with business goals — a cumbersome and time-consuming process.

However, when DEM is part of an observability solution like Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, it’s a part of APM and network visibility. This setup allows correlation of DEM data with business goals through a single dashboard, without adding extra overhead.

Data volume challenges

Applications and websites generate large amounts of data during user visits, such as load times, API calls, and clicks, which can be difficult to process and analyze. DEM solutions further increase this volume by collecting, retaining, sampling, and integrating data into data warehouses. For growing businesses, managing this data can pose significant challenges in terms of storage and effective analysis. 

Resource considerations

DEM solutions require significant investments in money, people, and time. You need to dedicate resources to data collection and analysis, implement DEM strategies, report on results, and iterate workflows and digital services to achieve the desired outcomes. So you’ll want to figure out whether the return on investment (ROI) is worth it to your business.

Happy customers become return customers. By providing real-time insights and catching problems early, DEM can pay off in spades. When applications perform well, customers are more likely to stay loyal. Quick fixes and smooth operations enhance your brand's reputation, encouraging repeat business. 

According to a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, you can achieve a return on investment (ROI) of up to 359% over three years by implementing comprehensive observability solutions that include DEM components.²

The report also states that labor savings from quicker problem resolution and incident prevention can reach $13.9 million over three years. Moreover, DEM’s ability to lower mean time to repair (MTTR) reduces downtime and operational costs while also avoiding major outages that can come with hefty recovery expenses.

Let’s not forget, DEM also supports complex environments like cloud and hybrid setups, helping businesses adapt and innovate faster. With DEM, your development teams can get the feedback they need to confidently roll out new features and meet market demands.

If you use DEM to turn “good enough” digital experiences into exceptional digital experiences, you can improve business and drive revenue, thus further improving ROI.

Overall, DEM proves to offer a significant return on investment by reducing costs, boosting efficiency, improving customer satisfaction, and supporting business growth. Not too shabby for an investment in your digital strategy.

DEM solutions typically include one, some, or all of the following components.

Real user monitoring

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a type of passive, real-time performance monitoring that collects and analyzes user interactions across browsers and mobile applications. RUM is critical to optimizing user experience, as it provides insight into the user journey by reporting web performance metrics and alerting when urgent issues are detected. 

Synthetic monitoring/synthetic transaction monitoring 

Synthetic monitoring or Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) simulates user behavior to establish baselines and measure performance in a controlled state. Using automated scripts that mimic typical user interactions, synthetic tests run at regular intervals to monitor the availability, functionality, and performance of digital services. It’s like a dress rehearsal for your application. You proactively test user interfaces, such as SaaS applications and APIs, to identify and fix issues. This way, when it’s showtime, you know key metrics like interactivity and visual stability are up to user standards.

Browser synthetic monitoring

Browser synthetic monitoring uses automated scripts to simulate user interactions with a website or web application — it’s like having a virtual user navigating around your site, clicking buttons, and filling out forms. This proactive monitoring provides insight into various factors, including page load times, rendering speeds, and issues such as broken links or JavaScript errors. This way, you can catch issues early and provide your real users with the seamless experience they expect.

Synthetic API monitoring

Synthetic API monitoring is akin to having a virtual inspector regularly checking the health of your APIs. Automated scripts simulate API calls to ensure they’re available, responsive, and returning the correct data. It’s a constant quality check on your backend services that helps you maintain the reliability of your applications and deliver uninterrupted service even as traffic scales.

API endpoint monitoring

Monitoring APIs for availability and response time is a critical component of delivering high-performing, cloud-based user experiences. Modern applications, architected and deployed as loosely coupled microservices, rely on API endpoint monitoring to ensure seamless integration and functionality.

1. Synthetic transaction monitoring tools

Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) keeps you ahead of potential issues by monitoring availability and performance of web applications, user flows, and web pages from different browsers across any global or intranet location. By simulating user interactions and transactions, STM can proactively monitor application performance along different scenarios to identify potential issues in real time — before users are impacted. 

2. APM tools

APM tools can benchmark health and performance across applications and alert when anomalies are detected. They deliver metrics on response times, latency, error rates, and resource usage, which can help identify and resolve performance issues. DEM relies on this application information and works alongside an APM tool to correlate application health with real-time user experience.

3. RUM tools

RUM tools capture and analyze data from actual user interactions with applications and websites in real time to provide insights into user experience, user behavior, and performance bottlenecks. Different types of RUM tools focus on specific use cases, including: 

• Mobile real user monitoring (MRUM): Tracks end-user experiences across all devices and delivery networks within native mobile apps.
• Browser real user monitoring (BRUM): Monitors users to optimize their experience in real-time, supporting core KPIs like revenue and conversion.
• Session replay: Records and provides visual replays of user sessions so you can analyze behavior and optimize websites and applications based on findings.

4. Network performance monitoring and diagnostics tools

Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) tools report on internet viability and alert on anomalies. In conjunction with APM, NPMD helps IT teams speed root cause analysis by quickly identifying or ruling out network issues. For example, Cisco ThousandEyes and AppDynamics have a bi-directional integration that lets IT teams seamlessly monitor both network and application performance from a single dashboard.   

5. API endpoint monitoring tools

DEM with API endpoint monitoring actively observes user experience quality when accessing APIs and delivers insights into the availability and performance of API calls. With synthetic API monitoring, you can validate API functionality and responses, test API workflows, analyze network stats like wait times, and receive notifications for any API uptime anomalies. Modern application development practices increasingly rely on APIs, making API endpoint monitoring a critical tool for cloud-based applications.

6. End user experience monitoring

End user experience monitoring (EUEM) tools leverage aspects of RUM, STM, and APM to offer a comprehensive view of how users interact across all your digital services, including devices, applications, and networks. 

Digital employee experience (DEX) and DEM are both essential for optimizing digital interactions, but they serve different purposes. As you know, DEM monitors the availability, performance, and quality of the end-user experience using leading indicators like page load times, error rates, and user behavior patterns to proactively identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible. With DEM, the end user could be a customer or an employee.

By contrast, DEX focuses solely on the quality of employees’ daily interactions with technology. It collects user feedback to understand satisfaction and productivity, aiming to identify systemic issues and improve the overall employee experience. While DEX can provide real-time insights, it often relies on user reports and feedback, which tends to make it more reactive.

Financial sector: 

First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), a leading provider in UAE banking, wanted to build a culture of continuous improvement fueled by better insights and application visibility. With Cisco AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and partner Perform IT, FAB improved MTTR and reduced downtime for customer-facing applications up to 70%. Better application monitoring also boosted performance across its business, IT operations, and dev/test teams. Read more.

“The combination of AppDynamics and ThousandEyes will give us deeper visibility across the full digital supply chain. As we continue on our path to full-stack observability, we’ll be equipped to deliver stellar experiences for our customers.” – Emma Lewis, head of technology service management, FAB

Healthcare sector: 

NYC Health + Hospitals has more than a million New Yorkers relying on them for fast, reliable services — around the clock. Even the shortest IT outage could have life-threatening consequences. Cisco AppDynamics helps provide visibility across network, infrastructure, and end-user services, allowing the organization to spot and address performance issues at the code levels and most importantly, maintain the highest standard of care. 

“Our staff depends on many critical applications and devices to do their jobs. The most gratifying part of working with Cisco AppDynamics is that we get to improve their experience each day and see that translate to better care for our patients.” – Jeffrey Lutz, chief technology officer, NYC Health + Hospitals

Public sector: 

Because the State of Indiana doesn’t require agencies to work with the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT) for digital services, IOT must stay on the cutting edge to remain competitive. Serving millions of citizens, IOT turned to AppDynamics for DEM solutions to ensure access to digital government services across devices for 78 agencies. Read more.    

“I create monthly metrics based on application score cards from the Cisco Full-Stack Observability platform that tell the story of the health of our business-critical applications to the executive branch of our state government.” – Brad Welsh, network architect, Indiana Office of Technology

Delivering excellent digital experiences starts with aligning your monitoring capabilities with your goals and selecting the right tools or platform for now and the future. APM is a great place to begin. With it, you get valuable insights that can immediately pinpoint issues and improve root cause analysis.

Next, it’s important to expand monitoring across your entire tech stack to see how users interact with your services. By enabling DEM, you'll accelerate MTTR, gain feedback for innovation, and better understand how your infrastructure and network impact your services.

Gartner describes APM as “a suite of monitoring software comprising DEM, application discovery, tracing and diagnostics, and purpose-built artificial intelligence for IT operations.” APM provides real-time insights on application health and performance to help IT teams locate and fix issues before users are impacted. However, APM does not monitor the network, infrastructure, or security aspects of the application environment.

By contrast, Gartner defines DEM as technologies that “monitor the availability, performance and quality of an end-user experience when using a cloud, SaaS, or web application.”  

A subset of APM, DEM focuses on user behavior and provides insights into how users interact with applications, including infrastructure and the network. While APM targets application health, DEM adds a user-specific layer to inform feature releases and prioritize fixes based on user requirements and business impact.

For example, AppDynamics DEM solutions identify root causes of application problems in real-time, from third-party APIs to code-level issues, so IT teams can quickly address issues that significantly impact business goals and user experience. 

It’s important to tailor your DEM strategy to your industry, userbase, and goals. Here’s a high-level framework to help guide you through the process: 

1. Start by defining SLOs and KPIs and understanding what you need to measure.
2. Select monitoring tools that assess and understand user journeys:
   • Use RUM, BRUM, MRUM, and session replay for real-time user experience data.
   • Implement STM to simulate user interactions and find potential issues.
   • Use API endpoint monitoring for third-party services and modern application architectures.
   • Use network and internet performance monitoring tools to identify potential issues with network connections, latency, and bandwidth.
3. Establish performance baselines, define thresholds, and monitor key metrics.
4. Set up monitoring processes and conduct tests across browsers and devices to ensure consistency and reliability.
5. Gather user feedback through monitoring tools, surveys, and other channels to understand satisfaction and pinpoint areas for improvement.
6. Develop and promote cross-functional (ITOps, SecOps) incident response procedures to quickly resolve issues as they arise. 
7. Encourage collaboration and transparency across IT, development, operations, and business teams.
8. Regularly review and refine your strategy basis based on new insights to continuously improve the user experience.

Start with your business needs. Most DEM tools have similar core technology, but they differ on features, scalability, and adaptability to work with the applications you need to monitor (cloud, mobile, on-prem/hosted, hybrid) as well as monitoring tools you’re already using.

Do your homework: research, chat with top vendors, watch demos, and understand how each tool’s strengths and weaknesses align with your business goals. At a minimum, consider these criteria for your DEM solution:

• Comprehensive coverage. Full-stack visibility is key, especially if your application infrastructure is complex. Make sure the tool works across all of your applications and domains, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, so you’re covered no matter where your apps live.
• Diverse monitoring types. Variety is key. Look for a solution that supports RUM, BRUM, MRUM, STM, and the other types of monitoring tools listed above. This way, you can see how real users experience your app and proactively test performance.
• Integration with APM. Ideally, your DEM tool integrates with your APM solution so you can see the big picture as well as tie digital experiences directly to business metrics and outcomes.
• AI-driven insights. AI can help your teams save time while reducing downtime and keeping users happy. Use AI to proactively spot issues, predict problems, and automatically suggest fixes — before they impact the user experience. 
• Scalability and flexibility. Your DEM tool should keep up with your business as it grows and handle the applications and infrastructure your organization deploys.
• Robust reporting and customizable dashboards. Look for solutions that let you tailor dashboards and reports to display the precise metrics on user experience and performance trends that mean the most to your business. 

For example, a DEM solution like AppDynamics offers comprehensive coverage across the entire digital experience, diverse monitoring types, and AI-driven insights to predict and resolve issues faster. Learn more about our solutions, and how we can help you deliver a flawless user experience.

If DEM is new for you, here are some quick steps to get started:

1. Create a DEM strategy 
2. Deploy DEM technology that serves your business goals.
3. Customize DEM tools by integrating the right business metrics and data.
4. Align IT and business priorities with your DEM tools.
5. Share DEM insights as a service to business partners.
6. Collaborate with business leaders and offer self-serve metrics to inform improvements.  

By monitoring user experiences on your website, web app, or mobile applications from their perspective, you gain valuable insights into the complete user journey. AppDynamics DEM solutions help track your pivotal transactions and highlight issues in critical components like checkout, cart abandonment, adoption rates, and user loyalty. Powerful DEM tools decode your end users' digital experience to drive business growth and streamline operations.

See how AppDynamics can help — request a free demo with our experts or contact us for a free trial.