DEM Goes Mainstream: from Hype to Critical Capability

In Gartner’s 2023 Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability & Enterprise Networking published this month, the analysts outline how–and why–digital experience monitoring (DEM) is now an IT observability has gone from hype to an IT essential in leading enterprises managing the performance their employees digital experience, the SaaS, web, and cloud applications they use, and complex networks that connect them.

Here’s our take on the key points from the full report.

Overview

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) technologies focus on tracking the availability, performance, and user experience quality when interacting with applications and their supporting infrastructure. These users could be external consumers, internal employees, or a mix of both. DEM technologies aim to analyze and model user behavior in the form of continuous interactions or “user journeys.”

Why This Is Important

DEM is crucial for providing visibility into the experiences of remote employees and the performance of web applications. It can be challenging to monitor network performance in various locations such as homes, retail stores, manufacturing sites and shared office space. DEM also aids in overcoming the difficulties of tracking performance in cloud-based environments or as-a-service-based applications.

DEM’s Business Impact

DEM employs Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) technologies to help businesses comprehend how customers interact with their brands across mobile and web platforms. Endpoint monitoring technology allows organizations to gain insights into the user’s endpoint, network, and service, regardless of location, without extensive physical environment instrumentation.

Drivers for Digital Experience Monitoring

The key drivers for DEM include enhancing user experience by providing visibility beyond metric-based performance, accommodating the shift from on-premises to SaaS-based applications, enabling flexible and efficient remote work setups, completing the “last mile” in full-stack observability, and monitoring Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and virtual desktop infrastructure applications.

Obstacles to Adoption

Challenges faced in DEM adoption include the scarcity of vendors offering comprehensive solutions across all DEM pillars, the complexity of managing endpoint agents, difficulties in managing vast numbers of endpoints, the need for robust analytics to handle large data volumes, and the lack of automated remediation capabilities among most vendors.

Recommendations for Enterprises

Enterprises should aim for a comprehensive view of the digital experience, minimize endpoint performance impacts, enable insight-driven automation, measure SaaS application performance, and monitor as many endpoints as possible for increased employee experience transparency.

DEM Vendors

Vendors offering DEM solutions include Apica, Catchpoint, Cisco, Kadiska, and Lakeside Software.

Kadiska’s Approach to DEM

Kadiksa uniquely offers real-user digital experience monitoring without requiring the installation of endpoint agents, while also providing real user connectivity performance monitoring from mobile, PC, and virtualized endpoints.

AI-based auto-diagnostics helps IT teams rapidly identify the cause of performance degradations across their end-to-end infrastructure to proactively optimize performance and rapidly resolve issues impacting employee productivity and business performance.

Explore the Platform

Digital Experience Monitoring Resources

Consult our comprehensive resources to learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about digital experience monitoring: what it is, how to deploy it, how it’s used and how it complements traditional network and application performance monitoring (NPM, APM), digital employee experience (DEX) and unified endpoint monitoring (UEM) solutions.