Best practices in digital experience monitoring

Digital experience monitoring has become essential in today's fast-paced digital world, where customers have high expectations for website and application performance. It involves monitoring and analyzing the end-to-end digital experience of users interacting with an organization's digital platforms. This helps organizations identify and resolve issues that can impact user experience, improve performance, and optimize digital strategies. DEM is crucial for organizations to ensure the success of their digital initiatives, as customer experience is paramount in the digital age. To maximize the benefits of DEM, businesses must establish a strong monitoring plan to ensure the smooth functioning of their websites and web applications.

In this article, we will explore effective techniques in digital experience monitoring that can assist companies in reaching their goals, enabling you to enhance your monitoring approach and guaranteeing the efficient functioning of your websites or web applications for a flawless user experience and successful business results.

1. Define clear goals and key metrics

Identifying clear objectives and metrics that align to business goals would be the first step in devising a successful DEM strategy for an organization as they help in setting benchmarks, providing direction for monitoring efforts, and measuring the overall success. Identify what you want to achieve, such as improved page load times, reduced error rates, or increased conversion rates, then combine with technical metrics (e.g., Core Web Vitals, API response times) to measure business outcomes like customer satisfaction or revenue growth. Finally, use DEM tools to compare your performance with industry standards and set realistic targets to achieve them gradually.

2. Monitor all digital touchpoints

Users interact with organizations through various touchpoints, such as websites, mobile apps, social media, and more, which makes it crucial to monitor all these touchpoints to get a holistic view of the digital experience. This helps in identifying any inconsistencies or issues across different platforms and ensures a seamless experience for users across all touchpoints and also helps in identifying any regional or device-specific issues that may impact the digital experience.

Testing performance across mobile apps, web browsers, and desktop environments, monitoring platform-specific issues like app crashes or API errors alongside web metrics, and using cross-platform analytics tools for unified visibility can pave the way in gaining a comprehensive view into how your web application is performing across various digital touchpoints in a single pane of glass.

3. Gain insights from tracking simulated and real user interactions simultaneously

Combine the power of synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring to gain valuable insights into the performance of your web application at a deeper level. This approach allows you to detect and address potential outages before they impact active users.

Synthetic monitoring simulates user behavior in various scenarios, such as different network speeds and devices, and can validate performance during non-peak hours. On the other hand, real user monitoring collects live data from actual user interactions, including page views, clicks, and transactions, providing businesses with a comprehensive understanding of their web application's performance. This combination enables proactive identification and resolution of performance issues before they affect end users.

Here is a simple table outlining the benefits that you can gain by combining synthetic and real user monitoring:

Feature	Synthetic monitoring	Real user monitoring
Proactive monitoring	Detects issues before users are affected.	Monitors real-time user experiences
Availability testing	Continuously tests uptime and response times.	Detects availability based on real user sessions
Geographic coverage	Simulates users from different global locations.	Captures real user locations dynamically.
Device & browser testing	Provides a controlled, repeatable environment.	Captures real-world performance variations.
Error detection	Limited since it doesn't track actual users.	Catches issues only when real users encounter them.
User experience insights	Limited since it doesn't track actual users.	Provides real behavior and frustration signals.
Traffic dependency	No real user traffic needed.	Requires actual user traffic to gather data.
Best use case	Ideal for proactive performance monitoring, SLA validation, and benchmark.	Essential for understanding real-world user experience and troubleshooting live issues.

4. Configure instant alerts and notifications

Configure actionable and adaptive thresholds based on dynamic baselines to account for typical fluctuations (like peak hours) and seasonal trends. . These alerts can be configured to notify the relevant stakeholders, such as developers, IT teams, or business owners, helping businesses take immediate action and prevent any potential downtime or user experience issues. Additionally, it is recommended to prevent over-alerting by fine-tuning thresholds to prevent unwanted alert fatigue and to focus only on key actionable insights of your websites.

Other alerting best practices include:

• Alert distribution: Distribute alerts across multiple channels (e.g., email, SMS, chat apps, incident management tools) so that critical signals aren’t missed.
• Prioritization: Classify alerts (e.g., critical, warning, informational) so that your team can focus on the issues that matter most.
• Role-based escalation: Map alerts to specific roles or teams with clear escalation paths. The right people should be notified based on the issue’s severity and context.
• Post-incident reviews: Conduct regular reviews after incidents to assess whether alerts were effective and actionable. Adjust thresholds and rules based on what was learned.

5. Monitor third-party services

It is crucial for organizations to closely monitor the performance of third-party services, such as content delivery networks (CDNs), analytics tools, and social media plugins, that are integrated into their web applications. This allows for a comprehensive understanding of the digital user experience on a larger scale. By proactively monitoring these external services, any potential performance issues can be identified and resolved promptly, even if the frontend of the web application appears to be functioning correctly. This approach enables organizations to make well-informed decisions about the continued use of these services or exploring alternative options. By doing so, organizations can ensure that these external services do not have a negative impact on users and compromise the overall user experience, ultimately maintaining a high level of dependability and user satisfaction for their web applications.level of dependability and user satisfaction for their web applications.

6. Integrate DEM with AIOps and Observability Platforms

As digital platforms continue to evolve in complexity, the manual monitoring and analysis required can be overwhelming. Advanced observability solutions powered by AI and ML can enhance DEM by providing automated insights and predictive analytics across the tech stack. It can help automate the monitoring and analysis process and provide faster root-cause analysis through unified visibility from frontend to backend systems, including applications, networks, and infrastructure, making it more efficient and accurate. By leveraging these technologies, organizations can also detect patterns and anomalies in user behavior and performance, enabling proactive resolution of issues and reducing the need for manual intervention.

Other potential benefits include:

• Improved incident management and reduced MTTR.
• Improved ability to adapt to evolving IT environments by learning from historical data.
• Become more efficient in cost management.

7. Continuously review and optimize your monitoring strategy

Digital platforms are constantly evolving, and so are the user expectations and the technologies used for digital experience monitoring. Hence, it is crucial to consistently assess and enhance your DEM approach in response to any modifications in workflows or the introduction of new features. This will guarantee that it remains in line with your business objectives and stays current with the ever-evolving industry standards. This may involve implementing fresh testing scenarios, adjusting monitoring intervals, or incorporating new tools to enhance the efficiency of your DEM strategy and adapting accordingly. Keeping your monitoring scripts up-to-date with regular web application changes can assist in preventing false alarms or breakdowns caused by outdated workflows.

8. Collaborate across teams and make data-driven decisions

Facilitate collaboration and gather inputs from various teams such as development, operations, marketing, and customer support to formulate a robust DEM strategy. Utilize advanced DEM tools to analyze the gathered data and gain valuable insights into user behavior, preferences, and pain points. Share comprehensive dashboards and reports with all teams to foster unified decision-making. By leveraging this data, organizations can make informed decisions and optimize their digital strategies to align with overall organizational goals. This enables identification of areas for enhancement, prioritization of initiatives, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the DEM approach.

Devise your digital experience monitoring plan with Applications Manager!

Begin your journey towards enhancing your website and web application performance by implementing the aforementioned best practices for digital experience monitoring. With the help of Applications Manager, you can achieve complete visibility into their operations within your infrastructure. Along with powerful digital experience monitoring capabilities, our tool provides valuable insights into application performance, infrastructure health, and cloud app functionality. Efficiently detect and resolve problems, streamline tasks through automation, and ensure uninterrupted user satisfaction. Schedule a personalized demo or take advantage of our complimentary 30-day trial to fully explore the extensive capabilities of our DEM solution.