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OBSERVABILITY VS MONITORING

Digital Experience Monitoring

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) uses synthetic monitoring and RUM to catch performance issues before users notice them, covering DNS, CDN, and every Internet path in between.

5–8 minutes
Denton Chikura

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    The quick download:

    DEM extends your monitoring strategy from infrastructure to the full user journey.

    • Synthetic monitoring proactively tests application paths before real users hit them, catching payment failures, broken forms, and integration errors during development.

    • Real User Monitoring (RUM) tracks actual user sessions in real time, enabling faster root cause analysis and data-driven SLA improvements.

    • DEM extends coverage to components you don’t directly control, including DNS, CDN, and ISP networks, where performance bottlenecks often hide.

    • Pair DEM with your existing infrastructure, APM, and log monitoring tools to build a complete, unified monitoring strategy without duplicating coverage.

    What is digital experience monitoring?

    As more applications move to public cloud infrastructure, IT teams lose the direct visibility they had in traditional data centers. The tradeoff between complexity and observability is most pronounced in public cloud computing.

    Public cloud infrastructure reduces the burden of managing your own infrastructure. At the same time, the downside is reduced control over the systems you use and, therefore, lower visibility into usage.

    Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) builds on your existing monitoring foundation to address this tradeoff directly. As defined in Gartner’s Market Guide for DEM,

    “Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises. These users, human or digital, can be a mix of external users outside the firewall and inside it. This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behavior of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.”

    Another way to think about DEM is that users’ actions are observable through the frontend user interfaces and the backend APIs, as the transactions they initiate flow through the systems. More importantly, what’s measured is the quality of their experience. By understanding the friction points in the overall user journey, business owners can deliver a better customer experience and improve retention and revenue.

    Types of digital experience monitoring

    There are two main types of technology that can support DEM:

    Figure 1: Digital Experience Monitoring Platform

    Both techniques work with applications hosted in public cloud environments with complex transaction journeys. It’s important to incorporate multiple DEM strategies to ensure applications run as intended and are optimized for the user experience.

    Synthetic monitoring

    Figure 2: Synthetic Monitoring Overview

    Synthetic monitoring, or active monitoring, uses technology to emulate the journey a user might take when interacting with an application. Synthetic monitoring deploys scripts that generate multiple permutations of random paths, covering a wide range of user interaction scenarios.

    These paths vary in many details, such as browser type, user locales, different journeys (e.g., completing a form or a purchase pipeline), latency, and other variables. This is important because all user scenarios are hard to catch during development, even with extensive end-to-end and integration testing.

    Synthetic monitoring solutions are automatic and can give insight into application performance across different user scenarios. This is especially useful for ensuring errors in business transactions are caught before deployment. For example, during a checkout process, it can catch when a payment method fails due to a bad API call or an invalid database transaction by generating a scenario that tests these different paths.

    Real user monitoring

    Where synthetic monitoring mimics user interactions, RUM tracks actual user activity across an application.

    RUM solutions often include a dashboard to visualize, in real time, the number of user sessions an application supports, a user’s path during a session, demographic data, and user metadata (browser type, location, etc.).

    RUM solutions also provide multiple ways to analyze this data. For example, when there’s a critical issue (like a server outage or unavailability of resources), RUM solutions allow administrators to pinpoint affected transactions, trace it to an origin when the issue occurred, and even show the affected users. RUM thus facilitates root cause analysis (RCA) by providing a way to monitor in real-time.

    Figure 3: RUM Monitoring Overview

    Why DEM?

    DEM extends performance visibility beyond the application code to include the user journey, DNS, CDN, and ISP networks. Combined with Application Performance Monitoring (APM), it gives teams a unified view from end user to underlying infrastructure.

    DEM focuses on a more general area that includes IoT, software applications, networks, infrastructure, and other areas, emphasizing performance from the user’s perspective. APM covers application performance from the software code’s perspective (how many times the code was executed, how long it took to complete, and if it ended in an error).

    Although the two are different, they work together to provide a complete view of application performance, from code execution through infrastructure to end-user experience. DEM adds the outside-in perspective that connects user-facing symptoms to their root causes deeper in the stack.

    Components you don’t control directly, such as DNS (domain name service) and CDN (content delivery network), can affect the end-to-end digital experience. DEM covers these as well. This functionality is valuable because an application distributed across the Internet is inherently complex, and a performance bottleneck can occur anywhere along its transaction path.

    DEM improves system resiliency by detecting issues before users encounter them. When paired with infrastructure monitoring, logs, traces, and AI-assisted correlation, it helps teams trace user-facing symptoms back to the responsible component, whether that’s a DNS provider, a CDN edge node, or an internal service.

    Figure 4: Monitoring Dashboard Diagram

    Use cases and best practices

    It’s important to know when to use synthetic monitoring and RUM. We have organized typical use cases in the table below.

    DEM SolutionUse CaseExample
    Synthetic MonitoringTest application features that are still in development. Its benefits come from proactively preventing unforeseen issues.Developers are working on a new account-creation portal that incorporates various third-party integrations and must support multiple account types.
    Detect unknown problems when user traffic is low. Facilitate pinpointing issues by emulating workload when launching an entirely new product or feature before the application has any significant traffic.
    RUMRoot Cause Analysis (RCA). Pinpoint the origin of a failure and collect data to speed up remediation.Leadership is interested in improving service level agreements based on historical application performance data.
    Analyze performance trends over time to inform reactive measures that improve user experience. The support team wants to diagnose a problem that only a small subset of users is experiencing.

    Some common pitfalls to avoid are:

    1. Plan for application changes. Synthetic monitoring isn’t resilient to user interface changes. A small change could break the testing harness and cause false alerts. The best practice is to include a step in the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process to validate that the changes won’t break the existing monitoring.
    2. Create a proposal outlining your monitoring needs. DEM solutions, such as synthetic monitoring, require planning and discussion with engineers. Don’t implement a solution without taking the time to document your organization’s requirements. Read this guide to the must-have synthetic monitoring features.

    How LogicMonitor achieves DEM

    Digital Experience Monitoring is about understanding how users experience applications across the full delivery chain, from the application and infrastructure stack to the networks, providers, and services outside your direct control.

    LogicMonitor Digital Experience brings that visibility together through synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, endpoint monitoring, and Internet Health. Synthetic tests and real user data show how applications perform across regions, devices, networks, and user journeys. Internet Performance Monitoring adds context from the Internet paths and third-party dependencies that can affect those experiences, including DNS, BGP, CDN, cloud, and SaaS services.

    That context connects with LM Envision infrastructure and application telemetry. Edwin AI correlates experience signals with related infrastructure, application, and Internet data to help teams identify where issues begin and understand their impact.

    The result is a connected view of digital experience and the systems and services behind it, helping teams detect issues earlier, determine responsibility, and resolve problems faster.

    See how LogicMonitor Digital Experience delivers the internet performance visibility your users depend on.

    LogicMonitor Digital Experience combines synthetic monitoring, real user data, and Internet Performance Monitoring to show how DNS, CDN, BGP, and ISP conditions affect application performance. Give your team the context to identify issues, determine responsibility, and resolve incidents faster.

    FAQs

    What’s the difference between synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring?

    Both are tools within IPM’s arsenal. Synthetic monitoring uses scripted tests to emulate user journeys from real-world vantage points, catching issues proactively even when no real traffic exists. RUM tracks actual user sessions, showing how real users experience your application across different networks, carriers, and locations. Synthetic is best for pre-deployment testing and low-traffic periods. RUM is best for root cause analysis and tracking performance trends over time.

    How does LogicMonitor Digital Experience complement Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?

    APM shows what is happening inside the application, while LogicMonitor Digital Experience shows how users experience it across devices, networks, and third-party services. Together, they help teams connect application performance with user impact and identify issues across the full delivery chain.

    What role does Internet Performance Monitoring play in LogicMonitor Digital Experience?

    Internet Performance Monitoring is one use case within LogicMonitor Digital Experience. It adds visibility into the Internet paths and third-party services that influence application performance, while synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring show how those conditions affect users. Together, these capabilities connect user experience with the systems and services behind it.

    How should I get started?

    Start by identifying the user journeys that matter most to your business and mapping the Internet path they travel. Deploy synthetic monitoring from real-world vantage points to test those journeys proactively, and add RUM to understand how real users experience them across different networks and locations. Connect that data with your existing infrastructure, APM, and log monitoring so root cause analysis works across the full delivery chain, not just the parts you directly control.

    By Denton Chikura

    Content Marketing Manager

    Denton Chikura is a Content Marketing Manager for LogicMonitor Digital Experience, where he drives content on observability, Internet performance, and digital experience. He writes for SREs, IT operations teams, and business leaders, turning performance data into guidance they can act on.

    Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LogicMonitor or its affiliates.

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