Introduction to End-User Experience Monitoring
End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) is a network monitoring approach that simulates user interactions with web applications, SaaS, and digital services. The purpose of EUEM is to assess the availability and performance of digital resources from the user perspective. The data collected and presented by an end-user experience monitoring solution enables network administrators to detect and troubleshoot network and application issues, sometimes before they severely impact the end-user experience. Understanding and implementing such a solution is very important for organizations that heavily rely on digital communications.
Benefits of End-User Experience Monitoring
Organizations adopt end user experience monitoring tools for three main reasons:
- Proactively detect issues before users report to the help desk – A proactive approach to addressing end-user experience issues reduces the burden on the help desk, which can implement prompt countermeasures.
- Reduce the time to resolution – End-user experience monitoring tools will be able to highlight whether the problem originates on the end-user’s device, the network, or the application itself: such built-in fault isolation provides quick diagnostic, reducing overall troubleshooting time.
- Reduce ticket escalations to higher support levels – One of the strongest ROI of end-user experience monitoring tools is that they empower help desk agents to handle more tickets, reducing the need for skilled engineers for tech support calls.
Impact on Performance and Business Success
Organizations that effectively implement end-user experience monitoring solutions unlock numerous advantages that enhance their business performance, such as:
- Cost efficiency – IT teams that address potential problems early on, and reduce troubleshooting time with end-user experience data minimize downtime. End-user experience monitoring also simplifies troubleshooting and reduces the resources and personnel involved.
- Improved user satisfaction – By monitoring network and application performance from the user’s perspective, businesses can analyze and optimize services’ usability and performance.
- SLA compliance – EUEM tools enable organizations to ensure the digital services they provide to their customers, employees, and partners are in line with business performance benchmarks.
- Increase productivity – For internal applications, monitoring end-user experience helps ensure that employees have reliable access to critical tools, improving productivity by preventing performance bottlenecks.
Challenges in Traditional Monitoring Approaches
Traditional monitoring approaches are not capable of monitoring the end-user experience. For instance, generic network monitoring tools track the status and performance of network devices and servers. To configure this type of monitoring software, the administrator must configure the network devices to reply to requests by the network monitoring tool. This is not possible with SaaS applications, as they are hosted by third parties. In addition, these applications are oftentimes reachable via a public network, the internet, which is managed by different parties. For this reason, monitoring the end-user experience with SaaS applications and digital services requires a different approach than traditional device performance monitoring solutions, or application performance monitoring tools. This new approach is part of a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) strategy of an organization.
Key Strategies for Effective End-User Experience Monitoring
Effective End-User Experience Monitoring requires a combination of key strategies to ensure optimal performance and user satisfaction. In essence, these tools provide application response time insights and correlate deviation from baseline to possible root causes, such as a slow internet connection, or a bad wireless network.
Collecting User Experience Metrics
EUEM tools collect performance metrics that help measure user experience. These metrics include network performance statistics and application performance measurements from the user perspective:
- Network latency – The time that it takes for the network to forward data packets.
- DNS response time – The time that it takes to perform a lookup query from URL to IP address.
- Web page load time – The time that it takes to load a web page.
Some EUEM products break down the user journey into individual response times, while others aggregate them. Other important user experience metrics include user device statistics, such as:
- Download and upload speed – The throughput available to the end users to download or upload a file over the Internet.
- Wireless signal quality – The quality and strength of the wireless signal, if applicable.
- Operating systems statistics – CPU, RAM, and disk resources are constantly monitored to ensure there are no performance issues on the host itself.
Utilizing Real-Time Data Analysis
The real time processing of end user performance metrics helps proactively detect user problems, perform root cause analysis, and minimize network downtime. EUEM tools store and process this data to establish a clear baseline of performance, allowing for the identification of deviations and potential issues. Two main alerting strategies make early identification possible. The first one compares a real time performance metric against its baseline to detect sudden changes. The second one compares a real time performance metric against a fixed value, in an effort to enforce a certain user experience or comply with a specific service level agreement.
Network Monitoring Agents
The architecture of a EUEM tool includes a central server and a set of distributed network monitoring agents. The server instructs the agents on what tests to run. The agents then send the data in real time to the server for processing, visualization, and alerting. The agents are dedicated hardware or software appliances for enterprise or cloud networks, or software clients for user devices. The endpoint agents provide a clear view of the digital employee experience at remote and home networks.
Tools for End-User Experience Monitoring
EUEM tools should be used by any organization that heavily relies on digital communications. There are two main capabilities that end-user experience monitoring tools implement to monitor user experience: Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring (RUM). These two end user monitoring techniques are different in their function yet complementary.
Synthetic Monitoring
Synthetic monitoring is a performance analysis technique that relies on automating continuous network and application testing via scripted transactions. These transactions simulate real users interacting with SaaS applications and digital services to quickly identify problems and their root causes. For this reason, synthetic monitoring is also called active network monitoring. The benefit of this approach is that testing is continuously run, from multiple monitoring points, delivering real-time monitoring of application availability.
Real User Monitoring
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a performance monitoring technique that tracks and analyzes the interactions of actual users with an application, website, or service in real-time. Unlike synthetic monitoring, which simulates user actions, RUM collects data from real user sessions, providing an accurate view of how the application performs under real-world conditions. For this reason, Real User Monitoring is also called passive monitoring.
Implementing End-User Experience Monitoring with NetBeez
NetBeez is a digital experience monitoring solution that monitors the network and applications from the user perspective. NetBeez offers both hardware and software appliances for enterprise and cloud networks. It also supports Windows and Mac software clients for users’ endpoints. The agents capture the real user experience, providing proactive notification of end-user experience issues.
The NetBeez monitoring dashboard provides key performance metrics to understand the end-user experience, such as:
- SaaS application performance
- VoIP performance
- DNS availability and query time
- Internet speed and availability
- WiFi performance
- VPN connectivity and performance
Conclusion
Unlike traditional tools, EUEM is vital for tracking user experiences, especially with SaaS applications. It helps businesses detect problems early and optimize performance. By monitoring key metrics, EUEM improves user satisfaction, boosts productivity, and ensures SLA compliance. This makes it an essential part of a company’s digital performance strategy.
NetBeez offer a simple solution to monitor the network and applications from the user perspective: request a product tour or start a free trial if you want to learn more.
