What is End-User Application Monitoring? Methods, Metrics & 12 Best Tools

Imagine launching a brand-new application only to discover that your users are experiencing issues. They might be struggling with slow load times, errors, or broken features, but your team does not know this is happening. From the outside, everything looks great. But the truth is, you won’t know what’s going on until your users start to leave negative reviews, and by then, it’s too late. This scenario is why end-user application monitoring is so important. With these frontend monitoring tools, you can track the performance of your application from the user’s perspective, so you can fix issues before your customers even know they exist. In this blog, we’ll look closer at end-user application monitoring and how it can help you deliver a better customer experience.

AlertLogic’s frontend monitoring is an end-user application that helps you do that. With our solution, you can track your application's performance from the user’s perspective and fix issues before your customers even know they exist.

Table of Contents

• What Is End User Application Monitoring?
• 5 Reasons Why You Need End-User Application Monitoring
• How Can End User Application Monitoring Help Your Business?
• 5 Common End User Application Monitoring Methods
• 3 Common End User Application Monitoring Metrics
• 12 Best End-User Application Monitoring Tools
• What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?
• Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

What Is End User Application Monitoring?

End-user application monitoring is like having a backstage pass to see how people interact with your application. When you launch an app or website, it's essential to know that it's up and running and how well it's serving the people who use it.

User Behavior

End-user or end-user experience monitoring involves monitoring what users do while navigating your application. This includes everything from where they click to how long pages take to load. By tracking these interactions, you get a clear picture of their experience.

End-user monitoring doesn’t stop at watching what users do. It also considers how the app is delivered to them. Is it loading quickly, and are there bugs? If your application is slow or glitchy, it can lead to a frustrating experience that drives users away. A study by AWS found that 88% of us won’t return to a website after a bad experience.

Issue Prevention

That’s a huge deal for any business or brand trying to keep users engaged. So, what does all this monitoring do? It helps you catch issues before they escalate into more significant problems. It’s like having a tech team constantly check your app's performance in the background, ensuring everything runs smoothly. 

By gathering data on user interactions and performance, you can identify where improvements are needed, whether it’s:

• Squashing bugs
• Speeding up load times
• Enhancing features

Experience Enhancement

End-user application monitoring is about ensuring your app works and works well, providing the best possible experience for your users.

5 Reasons Why You Need End-User Application Monitoring

1. Uncover What’s Working and What’s Not

When you’ve built an application, whether an e-commerce platform or a service-based app, it’s likely comprised of various sections or features. For example, an online store might have categories for different types of products. 

End-user monitoring lets you see which parts of your application are performing well and which aren’t hitting the mark. Maybe users are breezing through the checkout process, but they’re getting stuck on your product pages. With EUM, you can pinpoint these areas and take action to enhance the user experience.

2. Gauge the Success of New Features

Rolling out a new feature is always exciting, but how do you know if it’s working? End-user monitoring gives real-time insights into how users interact with the latest additions.

User Insights

End-user monitoring (EUM) is crucial for understanding user engagement with an application. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, such as:

• How users interact with features
• The time taken to load pages
• Any encountered issues

By tracking these metrics, businesses can identify areas for improvement and ensure a positive user experience.

3. Spot and Fix Page Load and Script Issues

We all know that slow-loading pages and script errors can quickly lead to user loss. With EUM, you can quickly identify these problems before they frustrate your audience. If your site takes less time to load, users will likely abandon it and look elsewhere. 

Monitoring helps you catch these issues early, ensuring your application is as fast and smooth as possible.

4. Make Smarter Investments

Understanding your users’ experience helps you make informed decisions about where to allocate resources. If a particular feature is a hit, it might be worth investing more. Conversely, you’ll know to pivot or pull back if something isn't resonating with users. 

Gartner’s Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring emphasizes that traditional monitoring tools often miss the user’s perspective, which can put your business at risk. EUM provides actionable insights that help you make data-driven decisions to enhance your application.

5. Overcome Monitoring Challenges in the Cloud

As more applications move to the cloud, traditional monitoring tools struggle to provide visibility into user experiences outside your network’s perimeter. With the internet now acting as the corporate network and the cloud as the data center, EUM becomes critical. 

It provides the instrumentation needed to gather essential performance data, ensuring that you’re never in the dark about how your application is performing from the user’s perspective.

Early Detection

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today! 

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• Browser Monitoring
• End User Performance Monitoring
• Frontend Monitoring
• Front End Optimization
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• Javascript Error Monitoring

How Can End User Application Monitoring Help Your Business?

Experience Your Digital Services

End-user application monitoring (EUM) is like having a behind-the-scenes view of how your customers and employees engage with your digital platforms in real time. It’s not just about ensuring your website or app is online; it’s about understanding exactly how users are experiencing your services. 

This insight is essential in today’s competitive environment, where a seamless user experience can make or break a business.

Sales Impact

Think of it this way: if you’re running an online store and your site is slow or glitches, customers will likely abandon their shopping carts and head elsewhere. 

EUM monitors everything from the speed of your pages to the performance of your web applications from the user's perspective. This means you can catch and address issues before they escalate, preventing lost sales and frustrated customers.

External Factors

What makes EUM even more powerful is its ability to look beyond just your internal systems. It considers external factors like cloud services and third-party providers that can impact user experience. 

Whether a customer is having trouble due to their internet connection or a hiccup with a service you rely on, EUM helps you get a complete picture of what’s happening. This broad perspective allows you to address problems quickly and ensure your digital tools deliver the best possible experience.

Business Benefits

For businesses, this translates into happier customers who are more likely to stick around and more productive employees who can work without interruptions. 

By monitoring the end-user experience closely, you can safeguard your brand’s reputation and drive better business outcomes. It’s about proactive rather than reactive in ensuring your digital platforms support your business goals.

5 Common End User Application Monitoring Methods

1. Real User Monitoring: The Ultimate Way to Track End User Experience

Real user monitoring (RUM) records the experience of actual users as they interact with your applications. RUM gives you the most accurate information regarding end-user experience. This type of monitoring is also known as passive monitoring because it collects user experience data without disrupting user activity. 

In RUM, data is collected primarily from the web browser being used by the user or the cloud. The most common way to capture accurate user data is by using JavaScript injections. How do you do that? While building an application, decide which part of the application you want to capture data from. Then, inject some JavaScript code to monitor user actions in that part of your application.

RUM Advantages

When the user uses your application, the JavaScript code will be triggered based on specific user actions and capture the required data. RUM is the most accurate because it provides information based on user actions. When you write a script, as is the case with synthetic monitoring, you might have overlooked a few user actions. Those actions will be covered by using RUM. 

When you use RUM, you don’t just capture information about the user's activity. You can also capture information such as page views, browser versions, user location, page load time, etc. The main drawback of RUM is that the results are only reliable when there is a decent amount of traffic. If no or very few users are using the application, the results are insufficient to take action.

2. Synthetic Monitoring: The Reliable Way to Track End User Experience

Synthetic monitoring involves using a robot to monitor the end-user experience. It is also known as active monitoring or proactive monitoring. To use synthetic monitoring, you must write scripts to simulate the user’s actions in your application. 

You might be wondering, “How would simulating help? If we need to monitor end user behavior, then why would we use a robot to simulate user actions?” Well, you don’t need a real user to analyze the performance of your application.

Synthetic Monitoring Benefits

You can write a script to do what a real user would do and see how your application behaves. When you use synthetic monitoring, you learn about the availability of your application and its performance. As a bonus, if you use synthetic monitoring, you can fix any issues found before making the application available to your real users.

3. Application Performance Monitoring: Tracking the Performance of Apps

Application performance monitoring (APM) tracks IT services through the performance of:

• Web applications
• Mobile apps 
• SaaS applications
• APM tools

These services help track metrics like:

• Error rates
• Downtime 
• Response time

These metrics give service providers insights into application performance and availability and how quickly they troubleshoot issues as they occur.

4. Device-Based End User Monitoring: Tracking Performance on the User’s Device

Using a heavy application utilizes many system resources, which, in turn, affects user experience. You can use device-based end-user monitoring to monitor the load your application is putting on the device being used by the user. 

The user might use various devices, including:

• Laptops
• Mobile phones
• Tablets, etc

Resource Optimization

You can use a light code to check the resources being utilized by your application on the user’s device. This will help you optimize your application for different devices. When you optimize your application, it runs smoothly on the user’s system, improving the user’s experience.

5. Business Activity Monitoring: Monitoring the Impact of Applications on Business Performance

Business activity monitoring (BAM) involves tracking critical business processes in real-time to gain insights into organizational performance and health. It encompasses collecting, analyzing, and presenting data related to various business activities, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions promptly. 

BAM integrates data from diverse sources, including:

• Enterprise applications
• Databases
• Sensors

Data Aggregation

This holistic data aggregation provides a comprehensive view of ongoing activities, facilitating the identification of:

• Bottlenecks 
• Inefficiencies

By monitoring these activities in real-time or near real-time, BAM enables proactive intervention to address issues promptly and optimize processes for enhanced performance and productivity. Key types of business activity analytics that BAM can monitor include:

• Process Governance: Monitoring adherence to defined processes and workflows to ensure consistency and efficiency. 
• Compliance Monitoring: Tracking regulatory compliance and internal policy adherence to mitigate risks and ensure legal conformity.
• Process Completion Rates: Analyzing the rate and efficiency of completing business processes to improve operational effectiveness and resource allocation.

3 Common End User Application Monitoring Metrics

1. Network Latency: The Enemy of Performance

Network latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another across a network. EUEM tools can:

• Monitor latency
• Help you keep it to a minimum

Latency Benefits

Low latency networks have faster response times, leading to the following:

• More efficient application performance
• More positive user experience

All businesses want to minimize latency, but it’s more crucial in certain industries and use cases than others. Organizations leading digital transformations must maintain low-latency networks to maintain productivity among employees and customers throughout the transition.

2. Application Downtime: The Silent Killer

Application outages can be caused by many factors, like:

• Network interruptions
• Coding errors
• Cloud vendor failures
• Scheduled updates
• Security breaches

Extended application downtime can negatively impact user experience (to say nothing of lost revenue and clients). Monitoring the mean time to detection (MMTD), or the time it takes to detect an issue, and the mean time to remediation (MTTR), the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot an error once it is detected, is crucial to minimizing downtime.

3. Bandwidth and Throughput: The Dynamic Duo

Bandwidth measures the volume of data that can pass through a network at any given time, an important metric when monitoring application performance. Unlike latency, which measures a system’s speed, bandwidth measures capacity. Organizations want to ensure their network can handle traffic and user activity, particularly during peak use.

Throughput Importance

Understanding throughput is often even more valuable. While bandwidth measures possible capacity, throughput measures the average amount of data that passes through a network in a specific timeframe, considering the impact of latency. It reflects the number of data packets that arrive successfully and the amount of data packet loss. 

Monitoring tools like Alerty can track network traffic and system storage, allowing IT teams to optimize systems and plan to keep applications running efficiently, even during peak traffic periods.

12 Best End-User Application Monitoring Tools

1. Alerty: The Cloud Monitoring Solution Built for Developers

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

• Application performance monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Incident management

It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues. 

• Alerty monitors databases such as Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
• Tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption
• It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience
• Its universal service monitoring covers dependencies like Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel 

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

2. Cisco AppDynamics: Performance Monitoring With Business Insights

AppDynamics is a full-stack observability platform that correlates performance with key business metrics to identify and resolve performance issues. It automatically tracks the flow of traffic requests while providing:

• Business transaction monitoring
• Anomaly detection
• Root cause diagnostics
• Full-stack analytics

Security Integration

AppDynamics also combines application and security monitoring, which enables IT to quickly identify vulnerabilities and resolve issues while breaking down silos between:

• Ops teams
• Security teams

The platform provides an end-user monitoring component that tracks key metrics across devices, browsers, and third-party services to capture data about:

• Errors
• Crashes
• Network requests
• Other events

3. ControlUp DEX: Digital Employee Experience Monitoring

ControlUp's digital employee experience management platform monitors:

• Physical endpoints
• Virtual desktops
• SaaS
• Web applications

It offers end-to-end visibility into servers and desktops, as well as users and applications, which enables IT to:

• Identify 
• Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks

Real-Time DX

The ControlUp DEX platform consists of three main products. ControlUp Real-Time DX. Gathers data about the end-user experience. IT admins can perform real-time monitoring through dashboards that make it possible to pinpoint and proactively fix problems. 

Through the Solve user interface, they can see the entire environment and search and group resources. They can use the metrics to find root causes and remediate issues such as excessive logon durations or slow application responses.

Custom Alerts

Admins can also set up custom alerts to meet their specific circumstances. ControlUp also provides free utilities for DEX management. Administrators can use the NetScaler add-on to monitor NetScaler environments or the IGEL integration pack to manage IGEL devices. 

Another available offering is the application profiler, which:

• Measures
• Analyzes
• Benchmarks application load times

4. Datadog: The Monitoring and Security Platform for Any Stack

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform that enables IT and DevOps teams to see inside their application stacks, even at scale. With over 600 built-in integrations, Datadog aggregates metrics and events across:

• Various systems
• Applications 
• Services

Tracing Libraries

Organizations can trace requests across distributed systems and monitor their code using open-source tracing libraries. Datadog provides auto-generated service overviews to track:

• Application performance
• Graphs
• Alerts based on error rates or latency percentiles

Admins can:

• Search
• Filter
• Analyze logs and navigate between logs, metrics, and request traces

5. Dynatrace: AI-Powered Observability

Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform that provides end-to-end observability, regardless of scale. The platform includes:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• APM
• DEM
• Application security
• Business Analytics
• Cloud automation

IT teams can use AI-powered analytics to predict and resolve issues before they impact users, as the platform provides a view of their environment that includes:

• Logs
• Metrics
• Traces

Topological Model

This feature also includes a full topological model that incorporates:

• Code-level detail
• Entity relationships
• Behavioral and user experience data

The Digital Experience module is one of the key components of the Dynatrace platform. It ensures that each monitored application, including:

• Web
• Mobile
• IoT applications are functional and available 

6. EG Innovations EG Enterprise: A Cloud-Based Monitoring Tool

 EG Enterprise is a cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring platform that supports on-premises and cloud-hosted applications -- including:

• Deployments in mobile
• Hybrid cloud
• Virtualized environments

Centralized Monitoring

The platform offers tools to monitor both modern and legacy applications, as well as tools to:

• Detect
• Diagnose 
• Resolve application issues

All from a centralized interface. It also includes tools specific to DEM. The platform provides:

• Built-in user experience metrics
• Proactive alerting
• Actionable insights

7. Raygun: Application Performance Monitoring for Web and Mobile Apps

Raygun is a monitoring tool suite that provides visibility into the quality and performance of web and mobile apps. The platform includes three primary tools:

• Application Performance Monitoring
• Crash Reporting
• Real User Monitoring

With Raygun, IT teams can gather detailed information about how users access applications, how they perform, and what issues users might face.

Issue Triaging

Administrators can also triage support requests and drill down into error or performance details. The Real User Monitoring product provides insights into front-end performance issues that can impact:

• Mobile 
• Web users

Administrators can look into slow pages, diagnose issues at the instance level, or view a waterfall breakdown of load times across components. The tool also has language support for:

• React
• Angular
• JavaScript
• Xamarin
• iOS
• Android

8. Middleware: RUM for User Journey Visibility

Businesses can enhance their applications with Middleware's Real User Monitoring (RUM) by:

• Gaining comprehensive user journey visibility
• Optimizing performance

It helps track real-time user activity, identify performance bottlenecks, and troubleshoot issues with core web vitals such as:

• LCP
• FID
• CLS

Action Analysis

Additionally, users can capture business-critical actions like checkout clicks and analyze full transactions for:

• Web 
• Mobile apps

One exciting feature in Middleware's RUM is session recordings and replays. Businesses can use it to:

• Monitor frontend performance
• Pinpoint errors and warnings

Issue Correlation

They can also correlate issues faster by automatically collecting and analyzing all:

• User actions
• Resources

9. Nexthink Infinity: Employee Experience Management

Nexthink launched Infinity, a cloud-based analytics, automation, and remediation platform, in 2022. The platform uses machine learning and benchmarking to:

• Enable IT teams to diagnose issues
• Automatically find their root causes
• Remediate devices 

It provides visibility across all environments and proactively identifies employee experience issues. Nexthink Infinity is a comprehensive DEX tool that enables IT teams to remediate over a million workspaces.

10. Riverbed Alluvio Aternity: Digital Experience Management

Alluvio Aternity is a digital experience management platform that provides actionable user experience insights while helping to:

• Predict 
• Prevent business disruptions

The platform collects and stores technical telemetry from various devices and applications, including cloud-native services. To facilitate data collection, admins must install the Aternity agent on application infrastructure and end-user devices, where it can measure what the user sees.

Unified Platform

Alluvio Aternity is a single platform that combines:

• IT service benchmarking
• Device performance monitoring
• APM
• EUEM

It can collect user experience information from any application or device, enabling the diagnosis of issues at the:

• Application
• Service
• Network level

11. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring

Oracle BAM enables organizations to monitor and analyze critical business activities and serves as a dashboard for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. 

It collects data from various sources across the enterprise and presents it in customizable dashboards and reports, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly.

12. Serverless360: Monitoring Serverless Applications

Serverless360 is a comprehensive monitoring platform for managing complex serverless architectures within cloud environments like Microsoft Azure. It provides:

• Centralized monitoring
• Management
• Automation capabilities for serverless applications

With Serverless360, users can visualize and control various components of serverless setups, including:

• Azure Functions
• Logic Apps
• Event Grids
• Service Bus

Related Reading

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• Opentelemetry Browser
• Measure Page Load Time
• Javascript Performance Monitoring
• Front End Observability
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• Opentelemetry Frontend
• Datadog Pricing
• Sentry Pricing

What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

End user experience monitoring (EUEM) is like a bird's-eye view of your IT operations' performance from the user's perspective. It’s not just about checking if your systems are up and running; it’s about understanding how well they work for those who use them.

Whether that’s your customers or your employees, their experience ultimately matters. In the IT world, teams often focus on application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring to ensure that their technical operations function smoothly.

End-User Focus

If you want to know how effective your services are, you need to see things from the end user’s point of view. That’s where EUEM comes in. It’s designed to help you make your applications:

• Operational
• Reliable
• Efficient
• Eser-friendly

EUEM tools gather data across the entire user journey, from the performance of end-user devices to the speed and reliability of the networks they’re connected to.

Comprehensive View

This comprehensive approach ensures you’re not missing any piece of the puzzle. It’s also important to note that when we talk about end users, we’re referring to external customers who use your products and features and internal employees who rely on your IT resources to do their jobs. 

What Does EUEM Measure?

One of the standout features of EUEM tools is the real-time analytics dashboards they offer. These dashboards give IT teams a clear, end-to-end view of service delivery, allowing them to:

• Monitor performance in real-time
• Diagnose the root causes of any issues
• Even automate the process of fixing those issues

It’s like having a 24/7 support team that ensures your systems are consistently delivering the best possible experience. By gaining a deeper understanding of how your customers and employees interact with your IT resources, your organization can improve its overall observability, meaning you can see more clearly how well your business operations are functioning.

Business Impact

This heightened visibility helps you:

• Identify and resolve bottlenecks
• Improve remote work productivity
• Enhance your products and services
• Ultimately drive better business outcomes

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

Alerty is a cloud-based monitoring tool for developers and early-stage startups. It offers:

• Application performance monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Incident management

Alerty supports technologies like:

• Next.js
• React
• Vue
• Node.js to help developers identify and fix issues

Database Monitoring

The tool monitors databases such as:

• Supabase
• PostgreSQL
• RDS, tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

What Are Alerty's Key Features? 

Alerty features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring to optimize the user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

• Stripe API
• OpenAI
• Vercel

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring.

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