Here we go, another acronym for your collection – DEM or Digital Experience Monitoring. Let’s explore what DEM is and why we should be taking note.
A cycle of frustration
Most enterprise IT teams will have monitoring solutions for the core infrastructure components like networking, storage, compute etc. These tools will likely be key in providing proactive alerting to issues and the required insights to enable effective issue resolution.
So the question is: why do we not have the same level of insights in to the end-user experience?
Especially when we consider it’s our users who are doing the work, interacting with the applications and servers we have all that clever monitoring for. How many times have we had that call logged to say, “It’s running slow”, but every metric on the monitoring dashboard is green? Too many, I bet.
There are so many times where I’ve seen IT teams that are unaware of the negative impact that technology is having on the end-user experience – and that was when the workforce was in the office on known networks. Now we have large portions of the workforce remote, the gap between what we know about the user experience and reality is even greater.
Technology plays a large part in the overall employee experience. With this being linked to user productivity/engagement and talent attraction/retention we must not ignore this growing void of information.
Where DEM comes in
DEM is the tooling to allow IT to see the full picture from the end-user’s perspective. It removes the unknowns while answering the question of why something is happening. We are looking to change the traditional workflow of ticket submitted, reaction and then remediation. This pure reactive model allows the user experience and productivity damage to be done before resolution and, in most cases, is very manual in nature so lacks scalability.
With DEM tooling we can move a proactive model and actively measure the user experience in real-time, providing metrics we can benchmark and provide an SLA against. Imagine having the data to quantify the user experience as a % while reporting on the real impacts, allowing focus on resolving issue. Nice, isn’t it?
Down to the nitty-gritty
DEM focuses on three key areas to support effective service delivery.
Proactive
Measure and manage the user experience leverage constantly running sensors to surface actionable insights on areas that could be impacting user experience. Correlate these across geography, teams, apps, device types, patch levels etc., allowing proactive changes that constantly improve the user experience.
Couple this with automation that can engage with the end-user to help them help themselves, or to issue surveys to gather real world feedback.
Pre-emptive
Proactive is a great step forward, but what if we could go further and stop the issues getting into the builds that are deployed beyond the acceptance testing groups? What was the impact of a given change – positive or negative? Should we continue the rollout or revert? What version of a given application should we standardise on? What device specification or VDI size should a user get?
For all these questions and more let’s use data to inform the decision process and then quantify the before and after impacts.
Reactive
No matter how well we manage the proactive and pre-emptive elements of a solution, issues and tickets will still occur. DEM solutions can integrate into common ITSM tools to enrich the data available to support analysts, allowing for faster ticket resolution.
By providing a complete map of the user’s applications, backend servers connections and network, we can rapidly understand the root cause and drive resolutions.
Let’s talk… End-user experience
Monitoring your users’ experience will be key to delivering great service, and in turn will deliver increased productivity and higher profits. Watch this Let’s talk data episode for a deep-dive discussion into one of the most subjective areas of IT. Watch on-demand
