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.
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.
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.
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:
End-user application monitoring is about ensuring your app works and works well, providing the best possible experience for your users.
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.
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.
End-user monitoring (EUM) is crucial for understanding user engagement with an application. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, such as:
By tracking these metrics, businesses can identify areas for improvement and ensure a positive user experience.
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.
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.
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.
Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Application performance monitoring (APM) tracks IT services through the performance of:
These services help track metrics like:
These metrics give service providers insights into application performance and availability and how quickly they troubleshoot issues as they occur.
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:
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.
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:
This holistic data aggregation provides a comprehensive view of ongoing activities, facilitating the identification of:
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:
Network latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another across a network. EUEM tools can:
Low latency networks have faster response times, leading to the following:
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.
Application outages can be caused by many factors, like:
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.
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.
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.
Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:
It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues.
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!
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:
AppDynamics also combines application and security monitoring, which enables IT to quickly identify vulnerabilities and resolve issues while breaking down silos between:
The platform provides an end-user monitoring component that tracks key metrics across devices, browsers, and third-party services to capture data about:
ControlUp's digital employee experience management platform monitors:
It offers end-to-end visibility into servers and desktops, as well as users and applications, which enables IT to:
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.
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:
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:
Organizations can trace requests across distributed systems and monitor their code using open-source tracing libraries. Datadog provides auto-generated service overviews to track:
Admins can:
Dynatrace is a software intelligence platform that provides end-to-end observability, regardless of scale. The platform includes:
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:
This feature also includes a full topological model that incorporates:
The Digital Experience module is one of the key components of the Dynatrace platform. It ensures that each monitored application, including:
EG Enterprise is a cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring platform that supports on-premises and cloud-hosted applications -- including:
The platform offers tools to monitor both modern and legacy applications, as well as tools to:
All from a centralized interface. It also includes tools specific to DEM. The platform provides:
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:
With Raygun, IT teams can gather detailed information about how users access applications, how they perform, and what issues users might face.
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:
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:
Businesses can enhance their applications with Middleware's Real User Monitoring (RUM) by:
It helps track real-time user activity, identify performance bottlenecks, and troubleshoot issues with core web vitals such as:
Additionally, users can capture business-critical actions like checkout clicks and analyze full transactions for:
One exciting feature in Middleware's RUM is session recordings and replays. Businesses can use it to:
They can also correlate issues faster by automatically collecting and analyzing all:
Nexthink launched Infinity, a cloud-based analytics, automation, and remediation platform, in 2022. The platform uses machine learning and benchmarking to:
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.
Alluvio Aternity is a digital experience management platform that provides actionable user experience insights while helping to:
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.
Alluvio Aternity is a single platform that combines:
It can collect user experience information from any application or device, enabling the diagnosis of issues at the:
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.
Serverless360 is a comprehensive monitoring platform for managing complex serverless architectures within cloud environments like Microsoft Azure. It provides:
With Serverless360, users can visualize and control various components of serverless setups, including:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
This heightened visibility helps you:
Alerty is a cloud-based monitoring tool for developers and early-stage startups. It offers:
Alerty supports technologies like:
The tool monitors databases such as:
Alerty features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring to optimize the user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:
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.