Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools

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From an IT perspective, a digital service, such as a cloud application, mobile app, or even an in-house system, used by staff looks pristine. Yet, end-users describe it as clunky, unreliable, or glitchy, which results in inefficiency and brand damage. Digital experience monitoring (DEM) ensures this doesn’t happen.

DEM is a digital strategy used to measure digital success. It helps businesses identify pain points and optimize the user’s experience. Digital performance monitoring tools help provide insight into what is happening with their digital assets, which provides metrics on how successful they are at executing their business strategy.

This article will discuss five of the best DEM tools for enterprises.

What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

As the name implies, DEM helps businesses identify digital pain points and optimize their digital experience across multiple channels, including mobile apps, websites, social media sites, and other digital assets.

DEM evolved from application performance management (APM) and end user experience monitoring (EUEM). It is now a comprehensive tool analyzing the efficacy of an organization’s digital applications and services.

Gartner defines DEM as “a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises. These users, human or digital, can be a mix of external users outside the firewall and inside it. This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behavior of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.”

Also read: Developing Digital Experience Monitoring Strategies

Importance of Digital Experience Monitoring

The insights provided by DEM tools help provide insight into what is happening with their digital assets to improve them through better customer service or enhanced user engagement. These metrics also enable companies to determine how successful they are at executing their business strategy and pinpoint areas of improvement for future strategy.

DEM solutions work with existing application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) tools to provide an end-to-end view of the user experience. Together, they give a holistic picture with DEM providing insight into the user experiences that have the most direct business impact.

What to Look for in Digital Experience Monitoring Tools

There are many different sorts of DEM tools on the market, so it’s vital to think about the following issues while developing a strategy and evaluating experience monitoring tools.

DEM tools offer the following capabilities:

  • End-to-end digital customer experience: This is a comprehensive digital picture with the ability to monitor, measure, and analyze digital performance across all channels, including websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices.
  • Integration into existing IT systems: DEM tools need to integrate seamlessly within an organization’s infrastructure so there isn’t any additional work required from IT teams for them to deploy or set up new software solutions. This also applies when it comes time to implement changes, such as updating credentials or adjusting settings post-deployment. Also, consider the consolidation of existing tools for greater operational efficiency.
  • Scalability: Sufficient scalability must be provided by the chosen solution along with either on-premise options or cloud deployments, depending on your requirements and digital transformation plans. Where DEM is required to monitor many assets, you must consider scalability upfront as it may affect the overall cost and ROI of your DEM solution.
  • Performance and availability: These include real-time performance indicators, such as website response times or page load speeds, which are essential for companies that rely on digital channels to conduct business transactions with users. In addition to this, there should also be functionality included within the tool, so you can create custom dashboards and reports based on organizational needs, including health checks, availability tracking, and being able to view historical data without having any additional coding knowledge or skill sets. Finally, DEM tools should be able to provide real-time event tracking for digital assets to identify user interaction and anomalies such as downtime or page load speeds.
  • Customer service level reporting: DEM tools need the ability to track, monitor, and measure customer satisfaction levels across digital channels, including website chat widgets along with email interactions. These are essential when it comes time to identify issues that could potentially result in decreased revenue opportunities (or increased support costs) due to poor customer experience and overall digital satisfaction rates. Having insight into your customers’ sentiments also provides an opportunity to quickly resolve any potential problems right from within a central management console without having to worry about costly IT resources required elsewhere throughout the business. Therefore, it’s important for seeing what you’re able to track and how you can interpret DEM data.

Also read: The Importance of Application Performance Management (APM) for Cloud-based Networks

5 Best Digital Experience Monitoring Tools for Enterprises

Below are five leading digital experience tools for enterprises, according to user reports.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a software analytics firm that allows businesses to simplify cloud complexity and speed up digital change. The all-in-one platform offers precise answers on the performance of apps, underlying infrastructure, and user experience to allow companies to innovate faster, collaborate more effectively, and create greater value with significantly less effort by automatically and intelligently monitoring at scale.

G2 recently named Dynatrace the DEM leader based on high customer satisfaction scores and a large market presence.

Key Features

  • Real user monitoring: This tool is AI-powered, full-stack, and automated. Dynatrace provides real-time insight into the digital customer experience through the eyes of the end user. It comprehensively captures the visibility of client experience throughout each online transaction. There’s no sampling of data; instead, you get a complete picture from front to backend. This solution is also available for SaaS vendors.
  • Session replay: The session replay functionality allows digital professionals to see exactly what the end user is experiencing, including detailed information such as device types and operating systems.
  • Synthetic monitoring: Dynatrace goes beyond DEM by offering a synthetic version of your online assets, which you can use to test the availability and performance from different locations around the globe. This is helpful for businesses that need to ensure their digital properties are available at all times regardless of where users might be located or what device they may be accessing these services on.
  • Mobile app monitoring to optimize mobile experiences: This DEM tool offers a mobile app monitor, which is crucial for businesses to ensure their digital properties are optimized on all available platforms, including iOS and Android devices.
  • Root cause analysis: This tool provides the unique ability to drill down into an issue to determine its root cause rather than give you the symptoms or general descriptions of problems that need resolution.
  • Business insights team: Dynatrace has a DEM business insights team who will provide expert advice, guidance, and recommendations for digital transformation.
  • Competitive benchmarking: This DEM solution offers competitive benchmarking, so you can compare your digital performance to industry-leading best practices.
  • Integration: Dynatrace offers integrations with many leading problem notification systems and test and deployment automation frameworks.

Pricing

Pricing for digital experience monitoring starts at $11 per month (billed annually) for 10,000 annual Digital Experience Monitoring Units. Dynatrace describes these units as a “flexible pool of Synthetic, Real User Monitoring, and Session Replay usage.”

The company offers users a 15-day free trial with no credit card required to try out the solution.

Nexthink

Nexthink focuses on employees’ digital experiences and is currently the leading Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform. As a result, project leaders have more information about employees’ daily technology experiences at the device level, freeing IT from reactive problem solving to focus on proactive digital experience improvement.

Key Features

  • End-user DEM: This happens at the device level (including Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS) to see what employees do on their devices. This allows IT leaders to know exactly if technology is working as it should for each specific employee or business unit across all locations and departments, and it provides DEM and recommendations based on user behavior.
  • Real-time visibility: This Nexthink solution brings together digital experience information from multiple sources, including end-user devices, applications, operating systems (OS), virtualization layers, hypervisors/clouds, and network components, all in real time to provide a complete picture of how employees are experiencing digital services.
  • Empowering employees: Nexthink enables digital business by empowering employees to be more productive with technology while reducing IT professionals’ DEM complexity. This solution gives users greater control over their digital experiences across every platform and device—even bringing mobile devices into full compliance for BYOD (bring your own device) initiatives.
  • Integration: Nexthink seamlessly embeds real-time experience data and key capabilities into your existing digital ecosystem. 

Pricing

The company does not provide pricing information on its website, but prospective customers can access a product demo to explore the platform’s features and capabilities.

Glassbox

Glassbox empowers businesses to deliver frictionless digital experiences for their consumers. The real-time digital experience analytics platform improves loyalty and growth by working in real time across mobile apps and websites. 

Glassbox helps teams prioritize customer experience and digital product improvements using AI-driven visualizations and analytics tools from a single integrated system. Teams from different departments, such as information technology, product management, marketing, and compliance, can interpret user issues, see the customer journey, and optimize each phase.

Key Features

  • Augmented journey map: This DEM solution provides a complete and interactive digital journey map accessible on mobile or desktop. It allows you to see the digital experiences of every customer across every device (including desktops, tablets, and phones) in real time, with all digital activities sourced from live production data.
  • Mobilebox: This Glassbox DEM solution offers Mobilebox, an end-to-end mobile app analysis platform for native iOS and Android apps. It identifies issues such as speed performance problems, security vulnerabilities, and code defects.
  • Session replay: Session replay allows DEM by capturing every click, swipe, and keystroke on mobile devices. This provides you with the ability to track all digital activities of customers across multiple device types. In addition, the solution captures full session replays, providing a complete view of the digital journey your consumers take while using native mobile applications, including crashes, performance issues, and UX problems.
  • Real user monitoring: With this Glassbox DEM solution, enterprises can see each consumer’s experiences when interacting with their website(s). You have access to the digital activities of every consumer, such as mouse movements and clicks, giving you the ability to pinpoint how you can improve digital experiences for each customer.
  • Integration: Glassbox comes with deep, seamless integrations with several other common enterprise software solutions.

Pricing

The company offers two pricing tiers, Optimize and Enterprise. Pricing is based on the volume of website and/or mobile app sessions and your data retention requirements. The pricing tiers start at 50,000 sessions per month. Customers can also request a free live demo.

Catchpoint

80% of performance and availability problems happen outside your firewall, according to Catchpoint. The company’s DEM platform gives you the information you need throughout your service delivery chain to detect, identify, and fix these issues promptly. The online monitoring platform uses over 850 monitoring nodes throughout the world, including backbone, broadband, cloud, last-mile, and wireless from various countries and networks to give you an external perspective on your digital experience.

Key Features

  • Synthetic monitoring: Catchpoint DEM uses synthetic transactions sent from its global network of testing locations. The company’s digital platform monitors the speed and performance for your websites or mobile apps, regardless of location, device, browser, OS, ISP (internet service provider), and connection type (mobile/Wi-Fi).
  • Network monitoring: Catchpoint provides a visual representation of how applications perform across your entire service delivery chain before reaching the end user. You have access to an interactive map that shows you where problems are in real time with pinpoint accuracy.
  • Endpoint monitoring: Catchpoint’s DEM also offers endpoint monitoring which shows you the digital experience of your end users. You can see how long it takes for web pages or mobile apps to load, plus their overall performance and availability across all devices.
  • Real user monitoring: Catchpoint captures every click, swipe, keystroke on each endpoint. It allows organizations to see what happens when customers at any location interact with websites or mobile applications via real browsers in real places around the world.
  • Integration and APIs: You have access to third-party integrations that allow seamless integration between Catchpoint and many other software solutions you may already be using.

Pricing

Catchpoint does not provide pricing information on its website, but customers can create a free trial account or book a private demo.

SysTrack Digital Experience Monitoring

SysTrack is a data analytics software that gathers and analyzes information on anything that may impact end-user experience and business productivity. SysTrack collects precise and comprehensive data right away from the workspace. The data is then analyzed and utilized by IT in numerous ways to lower costs and improve operations, including decreasing call center wait times, detecting under-provisioning, reducing time to resolution, tracking SLA performance, measuring rollout performance, and so on.

The SysTrack DEM can monitor over 400,000 endpoints making it highly scalable. The tool also has a low energy signature, utilizing less than 1% of a system’s CPU on average.

Key Features

  • AIOps: SysTrack gathers data from all your digital channels, including websites or mobile apps, cloud services, network devices, collaboration tools (email/chat), social media feeds, and much more. The collected information is analyzed with the help of AI to proactively make better decisions for IT service management activities, such as incident detection and resolution, workflow optimization, closed-loop ticketing automation, and more.
  • Workplace analytics: SysTrack features workplace analytics allowing you to combine deep end-user insights with operational telemetry gathered from hundreds or thousands of endpoints worldwide.
  • IT asset optimization: SysTrack’s DEM can also assist in optimizing your IT assets by helping you see the digital experience of end users on all devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
  • Desktop transformation: The digital workplace is rapidly changing, but many organizations are still stuck using legacy tools, making it challenging to keep up with the latest trends and demands of today’s workforce. SysTrack offers numerous ways to transform your business processes.
  • Integration: SysTrack collaborates with well-known IT vendors to create vendor-specific reports that IT administrators may use at any time to assess, monitor, and optimize their IT solutions.

Pricing

SysTrack does not provide pricing information on its website but offers a free demo.

Choosing a Digital Experience Monitoring Tool

It’s time for a new way of thinking about the customer and employee experience. The digital experience your customers and employees have is a crucial aspect of your business strategy. By choosing the right DEM tool for your enterprise, you will improve customer satisfaction, employee retention, and your bottom line. We’ve shared five of our favorite tools that are sure to be a good fit for any business looking to enhance digital experiences for better results.

Read next: AI-Driven ITSM is Transforming IT Management

Kihara Kimachia
Kihara Kimachia
Kihara Kimachia is a writer and digital marketing consultant with over a decade of experience covering issues in emerging technology and innovation. In addition to appearing regularly in Enterprise Networking Planet, his work has been published in many leading technology publications, including TechRepublic, eSecurity Planet, Server Watch, Channel Insider, IT Business Edge, and Enterprise Storage Forum.

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