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Top Reasons Why You Need a Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy

Your cloud application or service can look pristine from an IT perspective, while the end-user identifies it as “glitchy” and “unreliable”. Though the technical issues may not be your fault, it still impacts the user’s perception of your company and brand.

Issues could spawn from the user’s device limitations, the browser version, or a regional public cloud outage that is causing the poor user experience. Many of these things are out of your control, however, without any concrete data to show that the issue is not within your grasp, there is no way to prove it.

With digital transformation and the Internet of Things (IoT) changing the way we interact with the world around us, it’s often neglected that wherever connectivity goes, monitoring must follow closely behind. As applications and services move to the cloud, IT no longer has control and visibility into all components. This presents a challenge when attempting to deliver a high level of service quality. People have high expectations that online tools and communication channels always operate flawlessly.

In order to execute on this high standard of user experience, visibility into all available channels and a single pane of glass to watch over them is critical. That’s why creating a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) strategy is critical to any business’s success.

Looking at leading tools in application performance monitoring including Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM), you can choose the right DEM solution for your business, giving you end-to-end visibility into your end user experience.

Why is Visibility the Core to a Successful User Experience?

While most businesses may feel they have a basic understanding of managing the “digital experience” of their users, many do not recognize the key factor in its long term success- performance monitoring and optimization. Getting the most out of your digital landscape requires visibility of your entire IT infrastructure and how well it supports the needs of the users. DEM solutions help companies bridge the gap between performance and reliability with positive end user experiences.

Consider this scenario. Many companies view Microsoft Teams as a critical component to creating valuable brand experiences with their employees and customers. This has led organizations to invest in this application to provide the ability to connect and collaborate throughout the business. Design and usability, however are only two elements required to create a great digital experience.

To ensure Teams performance, you must consider multiple elements of back-end complexity:

Internet Service Providers and Mobile Network Access
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
Domain Name Systems (DNS)
Hosting Services
Microsoft 365 services; OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online; Exchange

There are so many factors that affect the overall delivery of your applications and services, it’s critical to monitor as many elements, from as many places as possible. If an issue arises, you can’t fix what you don’t measure and it can take a long time to get to the root cause and resolve the issue, leaving a negative user experience.

Digital Experience Monitoring gives businesses actionable insight to address performance issues before it impacts the user and tarnishes the brand’s reputation.

Not all Digital Experience Monitoring solutions are created equal. It’s important to know what to look for when choosing the right DEM solution.

How to Choose the Right DEM Solution

Being able to analyze the performance of an application or service requires real-time data from multiple sources to measure various aspects of the user experience. This can include availability, jitter, latency, packet loss, uptime and more. Using application performance monitoring tools is a reliable way to collect the data you need to understand the user experience.

Why Application Performance Monitoring Alone is Not Enough

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) includes software-based monitoring tools used to detect and diagnose application and service disruptions.

APM alone is not enough to identify and get to the root cause of problems impacting the user experience quickly.

Digital Experience Monitoring is a collection of tools to proactively measure the performance and delivery of an organization’s cloud applications and services, from the perspective of the user. Unlike traditional APM or NPM approaches, DEM provides critical insight into how the user is experiencing a cloud service, in addition to monitoring the service itself. This delivers a more comprehensive view of service delivery and performance, helping organizations to detect underlying problems before they impact the customer’s digital journey.

While it may seem like the core components of most digital experience monitoring solutions are similar, there are many differences in features and functionality. Basic monitoring solutions capture certain aspects of the customer journey but fall short of creating a full end-to-end picture of the end user experience. Detecting outages, and performance trends while sending alerts to the correct teams in real-time help to create a proactive approach to monitoring.

The leading tools for Digital Experience Monitoring include Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM).

What is Real User Monitoring? Real user monitoring (RUM) sheds light on the user’s experience by recording all interactions with applications from their point of view. Development and operations teams will then be able to swiftly trace errors and diagnose the specific application point of failure. Combined with a proactive approach to service quality monitoring that monitors the service 24/7, you can now prevent and troubleshoot any end-user experience issues.

What is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring? Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) is a method to monitor a service’s performance by simulating users. It works by issuing automated, simulated transactions from a robot client to your application in order to mimic what a typical user might do. This insight is mission-critical if you are running an online store or any site where you can reasonably expect traffic spikes. Using STM you will be able to identify and eliminate application issues before the end user reports them.

The DEM Solution

When used together, real user monitoring (reactive) and synthetic transaction monitoring (proactive) helps organizations to understand their users to ensure that they are supported in all aspects of the digital experience.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of digital business initiatives will require infrastructure & operations leaders to report on the user experience. Get started now, with a DEM solution that is adaptable, scalable and will help you future-proof your business needs as your requirements change.

Ready to Take a Proactive Approach to User Experience? Contact Us Today to Learn More.

The ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring

In business, it’s important to ensure that you are getting the most out of the tools that you are paying for. If it’s a monitoring service, the data you collect should give you actions to help improve incident management by identifying the root cause of user issues faster. Assessing the return on investment (ROI) for all of the tools you use in your IT department is an essential step for improved efficiency and adoption of applications.

While making the justification for a Digital Experience Monitoring solution may seem challenging at first, the ROI can be easily understood- and it all comes back to user experience.

Bridging the IT Monitoring Visibility Gap with Digital Experience Monitoring

You invest a lot in your monitoring tools. And they are great in what they do. They monitor availability and performance of their portions of the application delivery network. They notify IT when response time is slow, when packets are dropped or there’s an availability issue. All of these problems affect end user experience. The problem is that these products don’t actually measure user experience itself. Monitoring tools only infer user experience through latency, errors and alerts. The data collected by monitoring tools don’t represent what users actually see. This creates an IT monitoring visibility gap where everything can be showing as green on your monitoring tools, but users are still complaining of issues. This gap exists because you can’t monitor actual end user experience through these basic monitoring tools.

This visibility gap creates pain points for IT and the business as a whole. These challenges include:

Being Reactive Instead of Proactive
Spending too much time validating user complaints about problems – ever been to a mechanic when they can’t replicate the problem!?
The Blame Game- who is responsible for the issue?
Difficulty Meeting SLAs
Poor Perception of Service
Poor Insight into IT’s impact on workforce Productivity
Reputations suffer when internal and external customers feel like IT is constantly caught by surprise by their complaints.

Addressing these issues really drives up the ROI of your Digital Experience Monitoring solution.

Multiple, Disjointed Tools is Ineffective to Manage the Digital Experience

Many companies ask themselves, “do we really need yet another monitoring product?” This is a fair question to ask. The reality is that most businesses use a multitude of tools to monitor and troubleshoot their networks. All these siloed, domain specific monitoring tools create a gap in IT monitoring visibility. They tell the IT team when response time is slow, when there are too many errors or dropped packets, or when there’s an availability issue. All these problems affect the user experience, but these products don’t measure actual user experience. The cost of a negative user experience adds up through decreased productivity, employee frustration and lost revenue. Putting a price on the value that Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) brings to your business makes it easy to see the return on investment.

“The Blame Game”

When an end user experiences problems with their service, they blame the service provider or enterprise. The service provider is not always responsible for the issue, as it often is related to the end user. These issues could include:

User has low bandwidth due to poor WiFi
User has congestion on local network
User has misconfigured DNS
User’s ISP has high latency or congestion
User is taking a sub-optimal path to the service (e.g. misconfigured Azure routing table)

Both the Service Provider and the Enterprise carry a high stake in the “Blame Game” when it comes to resolving end user issues. The Service Provider is responsible to answer the calls of end users and deploy advanced troubleshooting to “prove” that the issue is not on their end. Without a remote access solution or on-site troubleshooting this requires a lot of time and comes at a high cost to the Service Provider. The Enterprise has the need to quickly resolve the end user problems in order to ensure business continuity. Being able to pin point the root cause of the issue is essential for effective incident management.

With a Digital Experience Monitoring solution in place, both the Service Provider and Enterprise can deliver a better customer experience by having informed answers to user-reported problems with services, with the help of proactive monitoring data. This saves the Service Provider and Enterprise both time and money by eliminating costly trouble shooting and lost reputation with end users.

Service Desk Improvements and Productivity Enhancements Through Digital Experience Monitoring

Improvements to the Service Desk is a key area to identify ROI on your Digital Experience Monitoring solution. With a Digital Experience Monitoring tool in place, the IT team can be alerted to issues that are happening in the environment. They are able to offer reactive support by pinpointing the root cause of any given issue through the data they are collecting with their monitoring tools. These alerts can also help them prioritize the issues that have a greater business impact, saving the business money in the long-run. The ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring for reactive support includes an improved mean time to resolution (MTTR), IT support time (wages), productivity impact caused by IT issues from workers (revenue). Digital Experience Monitoring solutions also offer Service Desk improvements with proactive support. Using tools that complete synthetic transactions, IT teams will know where an issue occurs before it impacts an end user. With Digital Experience Monitoring tools that perform these functions, the ROI is the result of no downtime for any end users, which results in business continuity and a positive user experience.

One of the biggest values of a good digital experience monitoring solution is the productivity gains created when a number of hours are saved from being wasted due to IT issues. That’s when understanding what the cost of downtime really means. Take a moment and calculate the cost of downtime related to IT issues, the number may surprise you!

Adding Up the ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring

By capturing the full picture on the user experience, you are able to offer proactive and reactive support when it starts to deteriorate. Digital Experience Monitoring gives IT teams the ability to detect, pinpoint and repair issues faster and more efficiently. The ROI on Digital Experience Monitoring can be added up through time savings, productivity enhancements and a stellar reputation for service quality.

Top Ways to Check Your Microsoft Office 365 Health

Top Office 365 Issues: Network Latency Issues
Top Office 365 Issues: Mail Delay Complaints
Top Office 365 Issues: High Network Latency
Top Ways to Check your Office 365 Health
ITIL Lesson Learned

Top Office 365 Issues: Network Latency Issues

Whenever a user complains about slowness in accessing a mailbox, IT administrators often suspect it’s due to an issue with the network. Still, they don’t always have enough information to confirm this.

To confirm the issue, admins will check with other users to see if they’re facing the same issue. Then they’ll try to access Google to confirm the speed of the Internet, and ping outlook.office365.com to check if there is any packet loss. If this doesn’t identify the issue, they’ll try to get the hop details and raise a ticket with Microsoft to find out if there are any issues with Office 365. This takes up a lot of time since there’s no proactive approach to checking the latency or DNS issues before a user has complained.

Martello can help administrators fix Office 365 issues before users even notice, by pinging the Microsoft end-point every five minutes. If any packet loss is found, it will immediately notify the admins. Martello also automatically gets the average round-trip time, notifying the admins when the threshold limit is exceeded. Martello checks the DNS query resolution, hop details, and latency, and notifies administrators of all of these things when it detects a problem. By proactively monitoring the Microsoft Exchange environment, administrators have the power to identify and resolve issues before any end-user complaints arise.

Top Office 365 Issues: Mail Delay Complaints

A top complaint with Microsoft Exchange Online is delays in sending and receiving emails. This leads to a loss of productivity among employees, and also takes up a lot of time for IT administrators.

When a user complains of this issue, IT administrators will start by requesting the user provide their email header, then checking to see whether the issue is widespread amongst the organization or isolated. If they find that the delay is happening on the Office 365 end, they will raise a case with Microsoft to identify the problem. Unfortunately, the Office 365 administrator can’t see the mail queues in the portal, so they aren’t able to proactively identify and fix email delay issues.

Martello helps save time and reduce complaints by providing a mail routing end-to-end check associated to an echo mailbox in the cloud that allows administrators to send a test email every five minutes to validate message reception and time. By doing this, Martello helps admins continually understand round-trip time, and be alerted in case of any failures in sending or receiving emails. This lets administrators be proactively notified about delays, and to fix any issues before the end-user even becomes aware of it.

[Podcast] Got complaints with Office 365 performance?
Watch this technical deep dive into the performance metrics that are behind the tickets and the complaints. We dissect user actions, dig into the response times and show you what is really happening when tickets come in saying “Outlook is slow.” Watch the podcast!

Top Office 365 Issues: High Network Latency

Any IT administrator knows that when users complain about slowness accessing a mailbox, it’s usually tied to network latency. Still, there’s rarely enough information to confirm this is the case. And there’s no native proactive approach to checking and managing latency issues ahead of time.

That’s why IT administrators go through the process of checking with other users in the same area to see if they’re experiencing the same issue. They’ll also request that the user try to access google.com or outlook.office365.com to see if there’s any issues. They’ll test a few other things before submitting a ticket to Microsoft to find out if there are larger issues impacting Office 365.

There are a few performance counters and aggregates that you have to constantly measure to understand how the network really impacts the end-user experience:

Packet Loss: Which measures how many packets are lost during transmission. The packet loss rate is measured as a percent.
MOS: Which measures the network’s impact on the listening quality of the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) conversation. The network MOS rating ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 being the poorest quality and 5 being the highest quality.
Jitter: Which measures the variation in arrival times of packets being received. Inter arrival jitter is measured in milliseconds (ms).

When organizations deploy Martello for Office 365, the Robot User can start pinging the Microsoft end-point every two minutes to see if any pocket loss is found. If there is, it can notify the administrator immediately. Martello can also get the average round trip time to notify administrators if the threshold limit has been exceeded. It can also send details on latency issues so that administrators can discuss with the network team as needed. Also, Martello checks the DNS query resolution to notify administrators in case of any errors found.

It is important to constantly measure the network latency from where the user are in order to detect, troubleshoot and fix issues before you get overwhelmed by users complaints.

Altogether, Martello helps administrators save time and deliver a better end-user experience by proactively monitoring and fixing network latency issues.

Top Ways to Check your Office 365 Health

The IBM Domino environment was mostly replaced by Microsoft on-premise technology and later replaced by the Microsoft Cloud Services. One thing that hasn’t been replaced is the need for administrators to have control and visibility of service delivery to end-users.

Whether you’re using IBM applications, Microsoft on-premise servers, or Microsoft Office 365, as the messaging administrator you need to provide availability and performance metrics of the service delivered to your management. You also need to understand the issues when they arise.

In a word, you’re still responsible for the service that you deliver, even if the servers are physically in the Microsoft datacenter. So, how do you measure the health of your Office 365 service delivery and how do you anticipate issues before they impact your end-users?

Microsoft works to maintain the 99.99 percent of availability they promise out of their data centre as well as to improve the features they provide and the performance they deliver. The issues that arise generally impact only some features and usually only affect a subset of users with a specific configuration or in one location. It’s difficult to know exactly how these issues impact your global network, and it’s impossible to predict, but it helps to know that Microsoft offers a health dashboard. The dashboard provides an understandable view of the availability and performance of each Office 365 service out of the datacenter. It also lets you configure alerts. The disadvantage is that the dashboard only shows service out of the data centre, and doesn’t provide any idea of the service that is experienced by your users or relative to your own tenant. It doesn’t provide information into how issues are impacting the availability and performance in your company. Lastly, it doesn’t take into account user complaints that can stem from many issues within the Office 365 environment.

Microsoft provides two tools that can be useful for measuring the health of the Office 365 services delivered to your users. First, the Remote Connectivity Analyzer allows you to run a series of checks from the cloud to the cloud that will test different part of the Office 365 services. This allows you to check if your tenant has problems with the basic functions of Office 365 by running Outlook connectivity tests, opening a mailbox, performing a mail routing, or connecting to Skype to Business Online. The disadvantage is that it is performed from Microsoft Azure to Microsoft Office 365, so basically from one cloud to another. It doesn’t provide you with any information that could help you troubleshoot what is happening at the user location.

Microsoft’s other tool that can be useful when it comes to checking the connection is called the Support and Recovery Assistant. This tool lets you perform tests to help you understand what’s happening when a location gets poor performance from Office 365. The problem is that these tests aren’t automatic or continuous, and they don’t alert you when an issue begins to arise. You still have to rely on user complaints for that.

That leaves manual testing as the last option for administrators. Manual tests are available in PowerShell. When conducting tests, you should start by testing pings to Office 365, DNS resolution time, latency, and end-user egress points to understand the impact of the network on your Office 365 service delivery.

Even if these tools are clearly not enough to measure, alert, report or troubleshoot the service to the end-users, they still provide something to work on to check the health of the Office 365 service delivered to the end-user. They show that Microsoft understands that the service out of the data centre is not what matters most. That is why when people think about the health of Office 365, they should always consider the entire route of the service, from the Microsoft datacenter to the user sitting at his desk.

When we measure health, we understand the availability and performance of the service. The border between poor performance and unavailability is small, especially for end-users.

In order to understand the health of your services, you need metrics, facts and alerts.

What matters is not really a poor performance but a degradation of the performance, because that is what users perceive. To measure the degradation of performance, you need to know what’s normal. It is called baselining. This requires something that continuously measures the performance delivered to your end-users and that can alert you when the performance is declining.

Finally, most of the Office 365 service is used in correlation with internal infrastructure applications and appliance that also have an impact on the service delivered. If you don’t monitor these applications at the same time and on the same dashboard, you will have difficulties troubleshooting the issue. Some companies have hybrid Exchange, some have also remaining Domino application servers, some are using gateways, proxy servers, and so on.

It all comes down to service delivered to your end-users. Whether issues arise from the datacenter or your network, it’s important to monitor and understand what users are experiencing so that you can maintain the highest level of service. Understanding the relationship between availability and performance from the user’s perspective helps you achieve better insights and oversight of your cloud or hybrid cloud health.

ITIL Lesson Learned

I completed my final ITIL exam today, and one of the questions was about verifying the cost of specific IT services to the business, and it reminded me of these statements:

You cannot Manage what you cannot control
You cannot control what you cannot measure
You cannot measure what you cannot define

It makes perfect sense, ITIL is about services, understanding the services that your IT infrastructure delivers to the business and managing accordingly. These statements, for me, form the basis for many many different aspects of ITIL. But most especially cost.

If you cannot measure, you cannot control cost.

In your collaboration environment, have you defined the specific services that you deliver to the business? Are you capable of measuring the quality of the services that you deliver to the business? (A running joke in Martello is that I manage to sneak in the statement, quantifiable metrics on the quality of service delivery in every meeting), have you measurement metrics in place to justify and control the cost of delivering collaborative services to your organization?

We in Martello are constantly surprised by the volume of customers that do not harness the power that Martello delivers to get even further value from Martello Gizmo. Martello Gizmo focuses on the availability and performance of your collaboration environment, in doing so it collects hundreds of statistics critical to measuring the services that you deliver to the business. Martello makes it incredibly simple to mine this information and easily deliver reports (with 100’s of pre-defined templates). Reports that can assist you in identifying and understanding operational costs, Reports that can validate the quality of service that you deliver to the business, reports to manage, control and measure.

Quantifiable metrics of quality of Service delivery ;-))

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Featured News

Martello BLOG

Top Reasons Why You Need a Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy

Why is Visibility the Core to a Successful User Experience?

How to Choose the Right DEM Solution

Why Application Performance Monitoring Alone is Not Enough

The DEM Solution

Ready to Take a Proactive Approach to User Experience? Contact Us Today to Learn More.

The ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring

Bridging the IT Monitoring Visibility Gap with Digital Experience Monitoring

Multiple, Disjointed Tools is Ineffective to Manage the Digital Experience

“The Blame Game”

Service Desk Improvements and Productivity Enhancements Through Digital Experience Monitoring

Adding Up the ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring

Top Ways to Check Your Microsoft Office 365 Health

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