Why end user experience monitoring is critical for IT success

April 12 2019
 

By monitoring the end-to-end user experience, IT professionals gain keen insights into application performance from the customer's perspective.


End user experience monitoring is one of the key capabilities of an end-to-end application performance management solution. By tracking every transaction in the customer’s journey, IT professionals can optimize the user experience with end-to-end performance monitoring tools that quickly identify application issues and significantly reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).

IT teams today must ensure the performance and reliability of distributed systems across on-premise and multi-cloud environments. And while modern applications deliver speed and flexibility, the rapid growth and variety of end user services—include increasingly popular voice technology—can generate an abundance of data that overwhelms the IT ecosystem.

According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index (GCI), which forecasts growth of global data center and cloud-based IP traffic, the rapid growth of distributed and cloud services is being driven in part by vast amounts of data generated not only by people, but also machines, sensors, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. By 2021, nearly 850 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be generated by people, machines and things, up from 220 ZB in 2016. (A zettabyte is a billion terabytes.)

How End User Experience Monitoring Helps IT

To fully understand the importance of end user monitoring, we need to take a closer look at the hurdles facing IT professionals, particularly the way they manage an increasingly complex application environment. As Forbes notes in a recent article on the top challenges for today’s technology leaders, digital transformation is a key concern of enterprise-level companies, along with accurately anticipating market demand and learning to trust artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions, including AIOps.

As end users turn to mobile apps and websites to access goods and services, IT teams, faced with a deluge of data, need automated, powerful tools to monitor the customer journey. Web apps, for instance, are often highly interactive, executing complex client-side logic to deliver an engaging user experience. And while these enhancements enrich the customer experience, they add complexity (and additional headaches) for IT pros, who realize it’s no longer sufficient to simply monitor performance only on the back end. To ensure the best user experience, companies must measure and analyze client-side performance, too.

End user experience monitoring (EUM), by automatically capturing errors, crashes, network requests, page load details, and other metrics, enables IT professionals to create a superior customer experience and quickly resolve issues. It makes it easier to understand how third-party APIs and content services are impacting performance, giving IT teams more leverage to enforce service-level agreements (SLAs), for instance.

EUM also allows IT teams to proactively manage key business transactions and respond quickly to web application performance issues in real time. It enables teams to consistently monitor key user paths through the web application with auto-discovery of related business transactions. With EUM, IT pros can proactively identify and receive alerts on emerging issues with intelligent baselining and error verification.

Front-End Complexity Demands Better End-User Monitoring

Companies increasingly need to reach a global audience. As AppDynamics’ white paper, Why Application Performance Bottlenecks Matter and How to Avoid Them in the Enterprise, makes clear, emerging markets such as India and Africa have far greater growth potential than developed regions such as North America and Europe.

A recent study by the Consumer Technology Association, for instance, found that smartphone penetration has reached 87% of homes in the United States. Low-end Android devices dominate in developing regions, and it’s essential for multinational companies to monitor the end user experience on these devices, thereby enabling them to optimize performance to meet regional constraints, such as high latency on mobile networks.

AppDynamics End User Monitoring

AppDynamics End User Experience Monitoring gives IT professionals end-to-end visibility into the performance of their web and mobile applications. AppDynamics is able to provide full visibility of the customer experience across every digital transaction. EUM helps IT pros troubleshoot problems such as slow web and mobile network requests or IoT application errors. EUM also provides metrics on application performance and user activity, such as:

  • How server performance impacts web, mobile, and device performance
  • How third-party APIs impact web, mobile, and device performance
  • Where your heaviest loads originate
  • How your users connect to and navigate your application

By providing industry-leading end user experience monitoring, AppDynamics EUM gives IT professionals keen insights into the performance of their applications from the customer’s point of view. It allows them to understand end-user experiences across the globe in real-time, while quickly resolving bottlenecks with end-to-end visibility.

Shreyans Parekh
Shreyans Parekh is a Senior Manager at AppDynamics, where he manages go-to-market strategy across product releases and is focused on innovation in the areas of End User Monitoring (EUM), Cloud Migration and IoT. His writing has appeared in publications by Intuit, IBM Bluewolf, New Relic, Apttus and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. He can be reached on Twitter @ShreyParekh.

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