An employee in New York signs on to a video conference with colleagues in London and Zurich to strategize about an event planned for the next week. In addition to the conference call app, they use a cloud productivity suite to update planning documents. They also refer to a customer relationship management app to update the attendees list. Everything for their company is riding on this event—and, consequently, the planning meeting. "I don't mind telling you I'm pretty nervous about all of this working right," the employee in London tells the others.

It's no wonder he feels this way. If one connection in a long chain—from each user's internet service provider to the apps at the other end—fails, so will the meeting, putting at risk the larger event their company is banking on to meet revenue targets.

Scenarios like this one play out in organizations all over the world daily. It's the reality of the modern enterprise. And it depends on getting the digital experience right to ensure that everything works flawlessly behind the scenes so employees can do their work.

As per a recent Gartner report, "The post-pandemic workforce will remain more distributed and remote, limiting I&O leaders' visibility into endpoints, connectivity, and application performance from everywhere." And, the report’s authors point out, this leaves employees and their organizations vulnerable to many things that can go wrong, including ISP and home Wi-Fi hiccups.

The visibility challenge

To keep on top of any potential issues, IT leaders in today's connected enterprise need eyes on all of the individual parts of the complex whole that contribute to the digital user experience. This includes, for starters, the user's connection to the internet. From there, users rely on nameservers and content delivery networks to get where they need to go online.

Then, and only then, can users connect to the cloud and the software-as-a-service applications on which they and their organizations depend. Dependence between those applications and the associated application programming interfaces must also work perfectly.

Finally, apps must check out at the code level to function properly and communicate with any necessary on-premises server and data center resources as well as those in the cloud.

Companies typically rely on technical monitoring of network connections and separate troubleshooting for applications to keep everything up and running, with the complete, end-to-end user experience taking a backseat in their analysis.

Yet, organizations today must get a complete view of the distributed, global workforce's experience to remain competitive.

Solving the problem

Gartner estimates that the number of digital business initiatives that require reporting on metrics related to the digital experience will jump from 15% in 2020 to 70% in 2025.

To get those numbers, IT organizations need to:

• See the full digital user experience, from application code and instrumentation to every network and dependency.

• Monitor every transaction within the digital service delivery supply chain.

• Monitor collaborative SaaS applications and hop-by-hop network performance from user devices, data centers, and branch offices.

Achieving those goals will give IT professionals new abilities in their quest to solve user experience issues no matter where they crop up. These capabilities include:

• Surfacing problems—whether at the application or network level—to the right teams, faster than before.

• Enabling more effective collaboration through simplified reporting across cross-functional and multi-vendor teams.

• Providing outstanding customer service via proactive responses to issues, often even before users become aware of them.

Fortunately, these capabilities do exist, and the benefits can accrue to enterprises that take advantage of them. To learn more, visit AppDynamics.com.