Understanding End User Monitoring & 15 Best Tools To Enhance User Experience

Imagine browsing a website, eager to find that perfect pair of sneakers. You click a link, and nothing happens. The screen hangs, and frustration sets in. This is where end-user monitoring becomes crucial. It helps ensure a smooth online experience by identifying and addressing performance issues. This blog will show how frontend monitoring tools help you understand end-user monitoring and experience management, ensuring your users never face that irritating delay.

Frontend monitoring, like Alerty’s solution, can help you visualize performance issues before users notice them, so you can fix them and keep your website or application running smoothly.

Table of Contents

• What Is End User Monitoring?
• Benefits Of End User Monitoring
• 5 Common Types Of End User Monitoring
• 15 Best Tools For End User Monitoring
• 3 Common End User Performance Monitoring Metrics
• 6 Best Practices For End User Monitoring
• Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

What Is End User Monitoring?

End-user monitoring is like having a backstage pass to see how users interact with your application in real-time. It’s the practice of tracking what people are doing while they use your:

• App
• Website
• Software

This goes beyond just looking at clicks or navigation, it’s about understanding how they’re experiencing your product, what actions they’re taking, and whether they’re running into any issues.

Why Does It Matter?

Imagine you’ve built an app and launched it. With EUEM, you get insights into how users engage with it. Are they breezing through the features? Certain pages may be causing users to hesitate or leave, and slow load times might frustrate users. 

These are the kinds of insights EUEM provides. It doesn’t just stop at watching what users do, though. It also monitors how well your app or system is performing from their perspective. For example, if a page loads slowly or a feature isn’t working smoothly, you’ll know about it.

How Does It Work?

By collecting and analyzing this data, you can identify ways to improve your app and make it more user-friendly. This helps you ensure that every time someone interacts with your product, they have the best possible experience. 

End-user monitoring is your way of keeping a pulse on how well your app is performing in the real world and ensuring it keeps your users happy and engaged.

Related Reading

• Application Monitoring Best Practices
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Benefits Of End User Monitoring

See What Your Users See

End-user monitoring (EUEM) lets you observe digital experiences from the user's perspective. What’s slowing them down? Are they getting lost in your app? You can find and fix these friction points to boost satisfaction. This understanding leads to happier users and higher retention rates.

Streamline and Optimize Performance

EUEM tools help you spot bottlenecks in real-time. Is something causing delays? Is your site or app struggling during peak times? You can optimize load times and processes, keeping users engaged and on track.

3. Catch Problems Before They Explode

EUEM helps you detect issues before they cascade into larger problems. This proactive approach minimizes disruptions and enhances stability. It is an early warning system to keep your digital services running smoothly.

4. Make Data-Driven Choices

EUEM generates a wealth of data on how users interact with your platform. This information guides product development, feature enhancements, and business strategies. Instead of relying on guesswork, make informed decisions that reflect real user needs.

5. Adapt and Stay Ahead

In a rapidly changing business environment, adaptability is key. EUEM helps you monitor user interactions continuously, allowing you to pivot quickly. You can stay ahead of the competition by introducing new features and updates based on real-time data.

6. Allocate Resources Wisely

EUEM provides clear insights into which parts of your digital ecosystem need improvement. This allows you to optimize your IT resources by focusing on the areas that require the most attention, enhancing overall efficiency.

7.  Foster Continuous Improvement

The data from EUEM isn’t just for one-off fixes. It supports an ongoing process of improvement. By making incremental changes based on real user data, you can deliver increasingly seamless experiences over time.

8. Invest Smarter

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. On the flip side, 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 Common Types Of End User Monitoring

1. Real User Monitoring: Watch Actual Users in Action

Real user monitoring gives you the lowdown on how real users interact with your app. No guesswork here. This is passive monitoring, gathering data as users go about their business. With a bit of JavaScript, you can track:

• User actions
• Page views
• Browser versions

It’s like having a backstage pass to your own show. But remember, you need a decent crowd for this to work. If your app’s a ghost town, you won’t get much out of it.

2.  Synthetic Monitoring: Robots to the Rescue

Synthetic monitoring is like sending a robot to do a user’s job. It involves simulating user actions to see how your app behaves. 

You write scripts to mimic what a user might do, checking availability and performance. The best part? You can catch problems before your users ever see them. It's proactive, not reactive.

3.  Application Performance Monitoring: Keep Your Apps in Check

APM tools are all about monitoring app performance. They track error rates, downtime, and response times, clearly showing your apps' performance. 

This isn’t just about ensuring things work; it’s about ensuring they work well. APM helps you spot issues and fix them fast, keeping your users happy and your services running smoothly.

4.  Device-Based End User Monitoring: Lighten the Load

When your app’s a resource hog, it can slow down everything. Device-based monitoring looks at how much load your app is putting on a user’s device. 

Whether they’re on a laptop, tablet, or phone, this helps you optimize your app for smooth sailing. When your app runs better, your users have a better time.

5.  Business Activity Monitoring: Keep Your Business on Track

BAM is all about monitoring business processes closely. It tracks everything from compliance to process completion rates, helping you spot:

• Bottlenecks
• Inefficiencies

This real-time data lets you make informed decisions and keep things running smoothly.

Early Detection

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

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• Opentelemetry Browser
• Measure Page Load Time
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• Opentelemetry Frontend
• Datadog Pricing
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15 Best Tools For End User Monitoring

1. Alerty: The Developer's Monitoring Ally

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

• Application performance monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Incident management

It supports technologies like:

• NextJS
• React
• Vue
• Node.js

Swift Issue Resolution

It helps developers identify and fix issues swiftly. Alerty monitors databases such as:

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

With quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities, it optimizes user experience. Its Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies such as the:

• Stripe API
• OpenAI
• Vercel

AI-Powered Efficiency

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, offering a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It's designed for ease of use, enabling 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: Bridging Performance and Business Metrics

AppDynamics is a comprehensive observability platform that connects performance with key business metrics to identify and resolve issues quickly. It tracks the flow of traffic requests automatically, providing:

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

AppDynamics combines application and security monitoring, allowing IT to swiftly identify vulnerabilities and resolve issues while breaking down silos between ops and security teams. The platform's end-user monitoring component tracks key metrics across devices, browsers, and third-party services to capture:

• Data about errors
• Crashes
• Network requests
• Other events

3. ControlUp DEX: Real-Time Monitoring for Employee Experience

ControlUp's digital employee experience management platform offers real-time monitoring of:

• Physical endpoints
• Virtual desktops
• SaaS
• Web applications

It provides end-to-end visibility into servers, desktops, users, and applications, enabling IT to identify and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks. The platform consists of three main products:

• ControlUp Real-Time DX: Gathers data about the end-user experience
• ControlUp Solve: Provides a comprehensive view of the environment
• ControlUp Insights: Delivers actionable insights for IT teams.

4. Datadog: Monitoring and Security for Complex Environments

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform that enables IT and DevOps teams to gain visibility into their application stacks, even at scale. With over 600 built-in integrations, Datadog aggregates metrics and events from a wide range of:

• Systems
• Applications
• Services

The platform provides auto-generated service overviews to track application performance, graphs, and alerts based on error rates or latency percentiles. Administrators can search, filter, and analyze logs, and navigate between:

• Logs,
• Metrics
• Request traces

5. Dynatrace: AI-Powered Software Intelligence

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

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
• Digital experience monitoring (DEM)
• Application security
• Business analytics
• Cloud automation

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

• Logs
• Metrics
• Traces

These come along with a full topological model that incorporates:

• Code-level detail
• Entity relationships
• Behavioral 
• User experience data

6. EG Innovations EG Enterprise: Comprehensive Monitoring for Modern and Legacy Applications

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

The platform offers a set of tools to monitor modern and legacy applications:

• Detect
• Diagnose
• Resolve application issues, all from a centralized interface

DEM Capabilities

It also includes tools specific to digital experience monitoring (DEM), providing:

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

7. Raygun: Visibility into User Experience and Application Performance

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 (APM)
• Crash reporting
• Real user monitoring (RUM)

Raygun Insights

With Raygun, IT teams can gather detailed information about:

• How users are accessing applications
• How the applications are performing
• What issues users might be encountering

The real user monitoring product provides insights into front-end performance issues that can impact mobile or web users.

8. Middleware: Real User Monitoring for Comprehensive User Journey Visibility

Middleware enhances applications with real user monitoring (RUM) by providing comprehensive user journey visibility and 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 Tracking

Users can capture business-critical actions like checkout clicks and analyze full transactions for:

• Web 
• Mobile apps

The platform's session recordings and replays feature allows businesses to:

• Monitor front-end performance
• Pinpoint errors and warnings

9. Nexthink Infinity: Cloud-Based Analytics and Automation for Employee Experience

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 digital employee experience (DEX) tool that allows IT teams to remediate over a million workspaces.

10. Riverbed Alluvio Aternity: Digital Experience Management for Business Continuity

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

• IT service benchmarking
• Device performance monitoring
• APM
• end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) into a single platform.

11. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring: Tracking KPIs and Metrics Across the Enterprise

Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) enables organizations to monitor and analyze critical business activities and serves as a dashboard for tracking:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Metrics

Oracle BAM 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: Comprehensive Monitoring for Serverless Architectures

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

13. Whatfix: Insights into User Behavior and Engagement Patterns

Whatfix offers detailed insights into user behavior across websites and applications. It collects and analyzes data related to:

• User engagement
• Interactions
• Adoption patterns within the application

By leveraging this feature, businesses understand how users navigate through their software, which features are most used, and where users might encounter challenges or drop-offs.

Actionable Guidance

Based on this data, companies can take action with Whatfix’s Visual Editor to create in-app guidance and contextual support to:

• Overcome areas of friction 
• Improve the overall user experience

14. Cflow: Streamlining Business Processes with Workflow Automation

Cflow is a cloud-based workflow automation software designed to streamline, automate, and monitor business processes. The platform’s functionality is centered around a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor that makes it possible to create, manage, and optimize workflows without needing extensive technical expertise. 

Cflow also provides visibility into workflow progress, enabling teams to:

• Track and monitor the status of tasks
• Identify bottlenecks
• Improve process efficiency over time

15. Pendo: Understanding and Improving User Interaction with Digital Products

Pendo helps companies understand and improve how users interact with their digital products. It gives businesses a clear picture of how people use websites, apps, or software by tracking every:

• Click
• Swipe
• Interaction

That data is then turned into valuable insights, showing:

• Where users spend their time
• What features they love
• Where they might get stuck or frustrated

3 Common End User Performance Monitoring Metrics

1. Quick Reflexes: The Importance of Network Latency

Network latency measures how fast data travels between two points. It’s the difference between a quick reflex and a sluggish reaction. When latency is low, application performance thrives. But when it’s high, users notice, not in a good way. 

Think about industries in digital transformation. They must keep latency low to ensure a smooth ride for employees and customers. It’s all about keeping the experience seamless, no matter your sector.

2. Keeping the Lights On: Monitoring Application Downtime

Nothing kills productivity like an application outage. Whether it's a coding error or an unexpected cloud hiccup, downtime can:

• Sour the user experience 
• Hit revenue hard

That’s where monitoring tools come in. They track the time it takes to detect and fix issues, known as mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to remediation (MTTR). The quicker you can spot and solve problems, the less impact downtime has on users and the bottom line.

3. The Big Picture: Why Bandwidth and Throughput Matter

Bandwidth is all about capacity. It tells you how much data your network can handle at any given time. But don’t stop there. Throughput gives you the real-world picture by showing how much data gets through. 

It accounts for congestion and latency, giving a true sense of network performance. Monitoring these metrics helps IT teams optimize systems and plan for peak times, ensuring a smooth user experience no matter how busy things get.

What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) offers a comprehensive perspective on how your IT operations serve real users. It's not just about keeping your systems functional; it's about ensuring they work smoothly for both your customers and employees. Users want reliability and efficiency, and EUEM is designed to deliver exactly that. 

It goes beyond typical application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring by focusing on the end user. This shift in perspective is key to making your services operational and genuinely user-friendly.

Gathering Insights Across the User Journey

EUEM tools track data at every stage of the user experience. They monitor everything from device performance to network speed and reliability, ensuring no detail goes unnoticed. This comprehensive approach helps IT teams understand how end users interact with their services externally and internally. 

Whether customers use your products or employees rely on your IT resources, EUEM provides a full view of the user experience. This depth of insight is crucial for improving service delivery and overall performance.

Real-Time Monitoring and Automated Fixes

One of the standout features of EUEM tools is their ability to provide real-time analytics dashboards. These dashboards give IT teams an end-to-end view of service delivery, allowing them to:

• Monitor performance
• Diagnose issues
• Automate the process of fixing those issues

It’s like having a 24/7 support team that ensures your systems always deliver the best possible experience. This proactive approach improves service quality and frees up IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Improving Observability and Business Outcomes

Your organization can improve its observability by understanding how your customers and employees interact with your IT resources. This means you can see more clearly how well your business operations function. 

This heightened visibility helps you:

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

6 Best Practices For End User Monitoring

1. Setting Up Alerts: Be Notified ASAP

Imagine your website is your prized garden. Synthetic monitoring tools are like the vigilant gardeners who watch your garden day and night. When something goes awry, you don’t want to wait until your plants are wilting. Alerts are your early warning system. 

They’ll ping you via SMS, email, or push notifications when performance issues crop up. This way, you can save the day before users notice. Use tools like Alerty to configure these alerts, your future self will thank you.

2. Transaction Monitoring: Simulate Real User Journeys

Your website isn’t just a static page; it’s a dynamic experience where users complete tasks like buying products or signing up for newsletters. Transaction monitoring emulates these user journeys to ensure smooth operation. 

This isn’t just about checking if your site is live, it’s about making sure users can do what they came to do without any hiccups. By catching problems in these critical areas early, you can prevent them from impacting your customers.

3. Test From Multiple Locations: Global Performance Insight

Your users aren’t all in one place, so your testing shouldn’t be either. Performance can vary greatly from one region to another due to factors like server distance and local network conditions. 

Testing from multiple locations can identify regional issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. This gives you a more accurate picture of your website’s global performance and allows you to address problems specific to certain areas.

4. Verify the Performance of Recently Added Features: RUM to the Rescue

Rolling out new features is exciting, but it’s also risky. Real user monitoring (RUM) helps you minimize that risk by providing insights into how changes impact performance. Whether it’s a major overhaul or a minor tweak, RUM lets you see how users interact with new features. 

This helps you catch any issues early and adjust before they become major problems. The result is a smoother, more enjoyable experience for your users.

5. Adopt an Integrated Approach to Performance Monitoring: A Holistic View

Your website is a complex system with many moving parts. To keep everything running smoothly, you must monitor all those parts together. Integrating RUM with other performance monitoring initiatives gives you a comprehensive view of your website’s health. This holistic approach helps you troubleshoot issues faster and ensures a smoother user experience.

6. Mitigate the Damage of Performance Problems: Protect Your Bottom Line

Catching performance issues early isn’t just about improving user experience, it’s also about protecting your business. Frustrated users are more likely to leave your site and less likely to convert. 

Addressing issues quickly can prevent them from impacting your bottom line. Additionally, with fewer performance problems to address, your development team can spend more time on valuable initiatives, helping to generate more business value.

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

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service tailor-made for developers and early-stage startups. If you're working with NextJS, React, Vue, or Node.js, you'll love how Alerty helps you identify and fix issues quickly. It monitors databases like:

• Supabase
• PostgreSQL
• RDS, keeping an eye on CPU usage and memory consumption

With Alerty’s Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can fine-tune the user experience. Plus, Alerty’s Universal Service Monitoring covers dependencies like:

• Stripe API
• OpenAI
• Vercel

Best of all, Alerty uses AI to make setup a breeze and won’t break the bank. It’s an efficient, affordable solution for developers and small teams.

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