What is Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)? Why DEM Strategy Matters

Digital experience monitoring, or DEM, is like a pulse check for your digital ecosystem. It can help an organization monitor the rhythm of its digital interfaces, ensuring every click, swipe, and keystroke resonates with efficiency and purpose.

In this blog post, we’ll examine the technologies IT teams use for DEM (and why), its benefits, and how DEM fits into larger initiatives around endpoint and digital employee experience (DEX) management.

Download the Ultimate Guide to DEX — an essential resource for organizations interested in realizing the benefits of providing employees with great digital work experiences.

• Digital experience monitoring definition
• Why is DEM important?
• How does digital experience monitoring work?
• Benefits of DEM
  • For employees
  • For customers
  • For business operations
• Digital employee monitoring challenges
• What is the difference between APM and digital experience monitoring?
• Is DEM different than end-user experience monitoring?
• Digital employee experience (DEX) vs. DEM
• Is DEX missing from your DEM strategy?

Digital experience monitoring definition

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is the continuous measurement and optimization of IT infrastructure and assets to deliver the best possible user experience for customers and employees. Since it focuses on tracking the performance, availability, reliability, and quality of experience when utilizing a device or application from the user’s perspective, DEM is considered a human-centric approach to improving digital user experiences.

Why is DEM important?

A growing share of interactions with employees and customers in most organizations are digital, and the quality of these interactions is shown to have a profound effect on the organization’s overall success.

By implementing DEM, businesses can enjoy enhanced user satisfaction. Organizations can use DEM to meticulously track and optimize the user experience across all digital touchpoints to identify ways to reduce user frustration and increase productivity.

DEM also provides valuable insights into user behavior so organizations can make data-driven decisions that align with user needs and preferences. This strategic alignment bolsters user engagement and drives business growth by ensuring digital platforms perform at their peak to achieve the business outcomes they were designed for.

Digital experience monitoring matters
because digital experiences matter.

How does digital experience monitoring work?

Digital experience monitoring uses various tools and techniques to collect metrics representing the quality of end-user experiences. For example, some DEM solutions can take automated actions to correct or optimize underperforming resources and provide alerts and reporting so that IT teams have timely information about the state of digital experiences delivered. They can also allow organizations to observe and model user behavior as a continuous flow of interactions, known as user journeys, to compile a comprehensive picture of digital experiences.

DEM typically includes several monitoring strategies, such as end-to-end network monitoring, application performance monitoring, and endpoint performance monitoring, to ensure that an organization’s applications, websites, APIs, and other essential resources deliver the best possible value to end users. To achieve this, DEM tools can include application and performance monitoring capabilities like:

• Real-user monitoring (RUM) uses JavaScript and plug-ins to monitor the activities and performance data of end-user interactions with applications and other IT resources.
• Synthetic monitoring generates application traffic and transactions to monitor network and application performance and identify potential issues before they affect end-user experiences. For example, these tools might detect network performance issues like high latency or slow connectivity that have yet to be noticed by end users and be used to reduce overall downtime.
• Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) is similar to and often interchangeably used to describe synthetic monitoring. However, STM most often involves using automated scripts to simulate user actions on a website or web application, such as logging in, navigating through pages, or submitting forms, to proactively ensure all system components (servers, databases, and cloud services) respond correctly and efficiently.

The best DEM solution for an organization should be tailored to its unique monitoring needs to ensure a precise and effective oversight of critical digital interactions. By leveraging targeted tools, digital experience monitoring captures the essence of user engagement, pinpoints areas for enhancement, and paves the way for proactive improvements.

Let’s explore more DEM benefits to learn how it can help transform data into actionable insights for an unparalleled digital journey.

Benefits of DEM

Digital experience monitoring benefits many stakeholders, including end users — both employees and customers — and the teams supporting them.

For employees

Not only do many employees today work in a hybrid or entirely remote environment, but workplace interactions are becoming increasingly digital as digital transformation continues to be a pivotal focus for organizations. In today’s digital-first world, employees expect seamless, intuitive, and efficient digital interactions.

When organizations can deliver on these expectations, it empowers employees to work more effectively, collaborate effortlessly, and focus on high-value tasks without technology roadblocks. Providing a stellar digital employee experience directly impacts employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention.

[Read also: Mastering employee engagement surveys: From data to action]

For customers

DEM can help organizations monitor the success of customer user journeys through business-critical workflows, such as shopping online and successfully making purchases.

Using a proactive approach to resolving and improving the digital experience for customers enhances satisfaction, bolsters brand loyalty, and drives business growth by delivering consistent and reliable digital services.

DEM is a strategic tool to help organizations stay ahead in the digital curve by ensuring their digital offerings are always at their best.

For business operations

DEM can help developers, DevOps, and IT teams more easily ensure applications and IT operations meet end-user expectations by using monitoring and analytics to identify and address issues before they impact users.

The comprehensive data collected through DEM can also help teams make informed decisions about upgrades, deployments, and resource allocation by allowing them to understand how users interact with their digital environment, enabling user-centric improvements.

Digital employee monitoring challenges

According to a recent Market Guide for DEX Tools from Gartner, monitoring digital experiences alone is often insufficient for Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders tasked with overcoming digital experience challenges.

While digital experience monitoring tools can help teams start detecting anomalies, discerning trends, and identifying root causes, IT teams have traditionally needed complementary tools to gain deeper insights and remediate issues with crucial components of the digital experience, including endpoint management, app performance, and user satisfaction analytics.

Why? DEM tools often lack the ability to integrate organizational context or effectively engage with end users, which is why it’s essential to bolster DEM approaches from mere surveillance to a more holistic strategy that incorporates organizational nuances and fosters employee interaction through more comprehensive tooling.

Let’s explore some of the different types of digital experience monitoring tools and common use cases for leveraging them as part of an effective DEM strategy.

What is the difference between APM and digital experience monitoring?

Optimizing and ensuring the performance of apps end users rely on (including SaaS applications and those running on-premises) through application performance monitoring, or APM, plays a key role in maintaining a seamless digital experience. APM is essential for ensuring applications run smoothly and efficiently, directly impacting the user experience.

Organizations have traditionally used application performance monitoring to track and raise alerts about performance, such as tracking response times, outages, and other metrics suggesting an application might be underperforming from a system-centric point of view.

In contrast, DEM takes a more holistic view, encompassing the entire digital experience from the user’s perspective. This includes application performance and the performance of the network, user devices, and other IT services that contribute to the overall experience.

While APM provides insights into how application performance issues affect the user experience, it is more narrowly focused on applications. DEM goes a step further by directly measuring and analyzing the impact on the end-user, often incorporating user feedback and sentiment into its analysis and considerations around usability, accessibility, and satisfaction to provide a comprehensive view of the entire digital experience from the user’s perspective.

Is DEM different than end-user experience monitoring?

DEM is considered very similar to the IT observability practice of end-user experience monitoring, also known as EUEM, since each can be used to monitor and improve users’ digital experiences interacting with applications, endpoint devices, and technology.

By collecting and analyzing telemetry data to gain insights into performance issues, both DEM and EUEM can provide visibility into the performance, availability, and quality of these experiences from the user’s viewpoint to allow proactive identification and issue remediation that could impact user satisfaction and productivity.

While DEM and EUEM share several similarities in their approach to enhancing user interactions with technology, DEM tools are built to encompass a broader scope of both performance and end-user experiences, while EUEM is typically more focused on end-user experiences. It’s helpful to think of EUEM as a subset of digital experience monitoring.

By focusing on the user’s perspective, both DEM and EUEM can help organizations identify and address the real-world challenges they face, improving satisfaction, efficiency, and overall digital engagement.

Digital employee experience (DEX) vs. DEM

Digital employee experience, or DEX, has emerged as an evolution of DEM by specifically addressing the need to consolidate insights from DEM, APM, EUEM, and more to provide deeper visibility over the entire experience employees have with workplace technology — with the added ability to drive remediation at scale to put these insights into action.

The growing demand to improve the digital experiences of employees, primed by years of digital transformation efforts, was only accelerated by COVID-19, fueling the need for business agility and the enablement of an increasingly remote workforce.

Through digital transformation initiatives, many IT organizations are replacing legacy monitoring systems with more modern counterparts like DEX.

With DEX, organizations can identify employee experience issues and resolve them swiftly, often before users encounter them.
 
Ultimately, this focus on improving the user experience of employees by ensuring that technology enhances rather than hinders also drives successful DEM strategies. DEX solutions serve as a strategic asset for IT leaders, enabling them to enhance the digital landscape for employees by meticulously measuring data from endpoints, applications, and employee feedback in real time to refine the interactions between technology performance and employee sentiment to uncover actionable insights that drive self-healing automation, optimize support, and foster employee engagement.
 

[Watch: See how Tanium DEX saves organizations time and resources]

The digital employee experience is a significant driver of overall employee engagement and success. A positive digital experience can lead to a more engaged workforce, resulting in higher-quality work, innovation, and a competitive edge in the market. It can also help attract and retain top talent, as professionals often seek environments where they are supported by robust and user-friendly technology.

Is DEX missing from your DEM strategy?

In the ever-evolving work landscape, the importance of a robust digital experience monitoring strategy has never been more pronounced. Any poor end-user experience can jeopardize employee productivity, whether it’s confusion among the apps offered by IT teams, slow application performance, or other problems with IT functionality.

Investing in good digital employee experiences is not just about keeping up with technology; it’s about fostering a culture of excellence and enabling your team to achieve their best.

With employees increasingly shifting between hybrid and fully remote roles and businesses accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, traditional DEM solutions are no longer enough to address the digital employee experience.
 

[Read also: Do you know how your employees feel about their digital employee experience?]

While an effective DEM strategy ensures your digital platforms are functional, intuitive, responsive, and ahead of user expectations — it may be insufficient for monitoring employees’ experiences. The Gartner Market Guide for DEX Tools illustrates how overlapping solutions for digital experience monitoring, unified endpoint management (UEM), and IT service management (ITSM) are necessary to support a comprehensive digital employee experience.

IT leaders are pivoting from mere technology management to creating business value by adopting DEX tools over DEM point products. This strategic move pays dividends in employee morale, operational efficiency, and business outcomes.

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Tanium’s Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution provides a centralized, scalable solution for managing digital employee experience at an enterprise scale. Tanium gives you real-time data on the performance of your employees’ endpoints and applications and how they feel about your digital employee experience — combined with self-service automation to remediate issues that surface at scale.

The Tanium DEX solution enables you to:

• Improve employees’ productivity, engagement, and retention
• Reduce help desk tickets and lighten the load on IT support
• Gain the visibility to monitor, manage, and improve your employees’ digital employee experience with one tool

Tanium wants to help organizations make progress toward achieving the most automated, intelligence-powered, and strategic approach for managing endpoints with our vision for Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM). AEM aims to empower employees so that IT resources are free to work on strategic business initiatives. In other words, when digital experiences serve employees and customers as they should, organizations are well-positioned to achieve their goals for digital transformation and move the business forward.