Many of the changes wrought by the COVID pandemic are here to stay—among them, significantly more knowledge workers doing their jobs at home. That challenges IT departments as they try to keep tabs on the systems and far-flung networks workers use. And they may be missing an important factor in what they measure: the user experience.

Gartner estimates that IT leaders will have to report user experience metrics for 70% of the technology undertakings their companies launch in 2025. That's up from only 15% in 2019, according to Gartner.

Fortunately, the numbers used to determine how well apps and connections perform can also help assess the overall quality of the user experience for both employees and customers interacting with a company's systems.  

Put another way, companies seeking to improve business outcomes that rely on the user experience can find the information they need in data captured by conventional IT system monitoring tools they may already have. Digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools that integrate traditional application performance monitoring (APM) with end-user experience monitoring can make the job even easier.

To make the shift to digital experience monitoring (DEM), IT leaders have to refocus their mindsets from a purely technical to a more human-centric model for monitoring their systems. 

Here's a checklist of elements needed to get started.

Key elements for DEM

These are the ingredients businesses need for digital experience monitoring.

• Endpoint monitoring focused on the user experience
  This type of monitoring includes software installed on employee laptops and other devices to get a read on the user experience and is especially helpful in the work-at-home environment. Data measured can include CPU, memory, and storage usage for given apps and can aid support calls.

• Application monitoring 
  Such monitoring measures the user experience on both installed and web applications. Also known as real user monitoring, or RUM, this type of monitoring can help developers assess such factors as what web page designs convert visitors to customers and what pages attract the most views.

• Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM)
  This type of monitoring allows IT departments to test applications such as software-as-a-service platforms before they go live to gauge the expected user experience and make adjustments as needed before release.

• Omnichannel monitoring 
  This means measuring the user experience across apps. It also means gathering information from such places as customer relationship management (CRM) entries and even social media posts.

• Cloud and network monitoring tuned to the user experience
  Cloud and network monitoring systems typically help IT departments keep track of the health of the infrastructure for which they are responsible. But such systems can also gather data for business metrics, such as the number of orders completed over a given period and employee satisfaction levels.

Making the DEM leap

These ingredients for DEM can help businesses not only optimize their networks, cloud systems, and other IT infrastructure but also gather valuable data on key business metrics based on a cohesive view of the user experience across apps and platforms.

Want to measure customer satisfaction? The impact of app slowdowns on business processes? The probable return on investment of a new cloud-based system? DEM gives you the data you need to do it. Don't just take our word for it. Check out Gartner's 2020 Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring.