It’s time to replace your application performance monitoring and real user monitoring systems with digital experience monitoring (DX) for a more comprehensive monitoring solution.
What is Digital Experience Monitoring?
Digital experience monitoring uses multiple mechanisms to identify application problems:
- Application performance monitoring (APM)
- Real user monitoring (RUM)
- Active testing of service response through synthetic transactions
- Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD)
To understand more about DX, read my article about it on nojitter.com: Why You Should Use Digital Experience Monitoring.
The power of DX comes from correlating all the available data to produce more accurate assessments of problems. This includes application performance monitoring, user monitoring, and real-time testing.
The correlation of the different mechanisms allows DX to accurately identify a problem’s source, including your network, the application’s internal processes, or networks outside your control. Its ability to analyze SaaS/PaaS/IaaS applications is especially valuable because it can detect problems within a service provider’s infrastructure.
On the client end of the link, DX can identify problems that affect the client’s computer and its local network. In one case study, we were able to identify a problem with an executive’s home WiFi.
The prevalence of cloud-based services, work-from-home, and internet VPN means that many network paths are over networks that are not under corporate control. DX can identify when there are problems with these networks. In another use-case, we were able to identify a network routing problem between two ISPs that was affecting file transfers several times per hour.
DX is also useful for identifying problems with critical parts of web sites, such as the order placement component or product search function. Getting a baseline for performance and then monitoring it over time is essential to smooth eCommerce operations. You’ll want to use DX tools to differentiate between a JavaScript problem on the client endpoint and an application or database problem.
Unified communications and collaboration problems are also transparent when DX is applied. Is it a server problem, network problem, or something else? If it is a network problem, what part of the network is the cause? This diagnostic capability across many endpoints is essential for supporting the work-from-home staff that many organizations rely on each day.
Making DX Useful
Sound reporting systems are critical to any network monitoring system. Efficient reporting mechanisms are required to allow you to identify the most severe problems without examining data from hundreds or thousands of applications, networks, and clients. You’ll also want the ability to feed alerts to an event management system where algorithms can alert operators. Some event management systems are now using machine learning to correlate events, resulting in fewer actionable events.
One customer uses their DX product to identify at least one problem every day, allowing them to continuously improve their Internet presence.
Conclusion
Catchpoint is NetCraftsmen’s preferred DX partner. We’ve used it in several use-cases, solving problems that would have been challenging and time-consuming to solve with other tools. If you have an application or network problem that’s been impossible to solve, give us a chance to examine it. Our combination of tools and expertise means that NetCraftsmen personnel identify and solve problems efficiently.