What Is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

By Alex Carter on September 23, 2024

Monitoring application performance and user experience is critical for companies that rely on cloud services, SaaS apps, and remote work. Traditional infrastructure-focused technologies are ineffective in detecting user-impacting problems.

End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) provides real-time information on application performance, network reliability, and system responsiveness. Organizations may proactively detect performance bottlenecks and improve digital experiences by measuring metrics such as network latency, downtime, and resource load times.

What is End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM)?

EUEM enables teams to monitor the impact of application and device performance from the end user’s point of view. EUEM products help IT ensure the quality of key IT services across an enterprise. Unlike domain-specific monitoring tools that look at the performance and availability of individual infrastructure components, EUEM products monitor IT, as seen by the end user.

EUEM focuses on how users interact with applications, not just system performance. It provides real-time analytics, automated issue resolution, dashboards, and user feedback to help IT teams quickly detect and fix performance problems. EUEM works like traffic management tools by identifying and addressing user experience disruptions before they affect productivity.

Types of EUEM Tools

Various EUEM tools provide real-time visibility for IT teams, each serving a specific function. Common tools include:

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Tracks the performance of web and mobile applications;
• JavaScript Injection: Measures response times within a user’s browser;
• End User Monitoring: Observes user interactions and system behavior;
• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Captures data from actual user interactions;
• Synthetic Monitoring: Simulates user activity to test performance;
• Transaction Monitoring: Tracks the execution of business transactions;
• API Monitoring: Assesses the performance and availability of APIs.

These tools help IT teams diagnose issues, identify root causes, resolve backend performance problems, and minimize bottlenecks, latency, and response delays.

Key Metrics in EUEM

End-user experience is measured by documenting a range of metrics that evaluate performance, responsiveness, and system reliability. While EUEM instruments have varying capabilities, common metrics include:

• Network Latency: Measures how long data takes to travel across a network. Lower latency improves response times, application performance, and user experience, especially for real-time operations;
• Application Downtime: Outages from network issues, coding errors, or security incidents can disrupt business. Monitoring detection (MTTD) and resolution times (MTTR) help minimize downtime;
• Bandwidth & Throughput: Bandwidth shows a network’s data capacity, while throughput reflects the actual transmitted data, accounting for latency and packet loss.

Why Businesses Need EUEM

Traditional monitoring solutions were designed for on-premises systems, giving full visibility into network and application performance. However, when employees use SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Zoom remotely, IT departments struggle to have a complete insight of the user experience. Cloud services have their own metrics, but they are often separated, making it harder to identify issues.

Gartner points out that, while SaaS providers monitor their systems, they do not share insights into end-user performance, leaving organizations without critical data. To successfully address issues, companies require metrics that monitor network pathways, application behavior, and system performance from the user’s perspective.

With a remote workforce and reliance on third-party networks, IT teams need more than uptime and response time statistics. Comprehensive monitoring is essential to ensure service quality across cloud-based applications.

Methods for EUEM

Organizations utilize a variety of methods and tactics to assess and enhance the end-user experience in IT. These technologies assist IT professionals in detecting backend issues and ensuring reliable service functioning. Key performance metrics include application utilization, network traffic, connection speeds, and device performance. A monitoring platform that uses both active and passive approaches provides a comprehensive view of user activities.

• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Tracks how users interact with applications and websites, measuring page load speeds, bounce rates, and behavior. It provides real-world insights but mainly identifies issues after they happen;
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Monitors web, mobile, and SaaS applications by tracking error rates, downtime, and response times, helping IT teams diagnose and fix problems efficiently;
• Synthetic Monitoring: Simulates user activity under different network conditions and locations to detect performance issues before they affect real users;
• Device Performance Monitoring (DPM): Tracks the health of endpoint devices like computers, servers, and mobile devices, helping identify security risks and performance problems to maintain system reliability.

Key Benefits of EUEM

EUEM solutions help businesses maintain smooth digital experiences by providing:

• Comprehensive Visibility: Track user devices, network performance, and application responsiveness in real time;
• Faster Issue Resolution: Minimize downtime by quickly identifying and fixing performance problems;
• Proactive Monitoring: Detect potential issues before they disrupt user workflows;
• Centralized Insights: Use a unified dashboard to analyze endpoint and network data for informed decision-making.

Advancing Monitoring Solutions to Meet Modern IT Demands

Traditional monitoring tools often lack full visibility into complex IT systems. With users relying on multiple devices and remote connections, IT teams need solutions that provide a complete view of digital experiences across corporate networks, internet services, and SaaS applications.

Legacy monitoring systems focus on isolated components rather than the entire service chain, creating blind spots where systems appear functional while users still face performance issues. Separate tools for network (NPM), application (APM), and device performance further contribute to fragmented visibility.

EUEM solves these gaps by combining data into a single dashboard. This technique assists IT organizations in identifying performance bottlenecks, reducing response times, and improving service dependability, all while facilitating improved communication among network, security, and IT teams.

EUEM Tools

With various features and terms associated with end-user experience monitoring, understanding what vendors offer is essential. Below are nine tools that help clarify how different platforms integrate EUEM and what each solution provides.

Cisco AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a full-stack observability platform that integrates performance data with critical business indicators. It automatically monitors traffic flow, identifies irregularities, determines underlying causes, and offers full-stack analytics. The platform unifies application and security monitoring, enabling IT teams to quickly discover vulnerabilities and rectify issues.

Its end-user monitoring tool monitors performance across devices, browsers, and third-party services, collecting information on failures, crashes, and network traffic. The key components are:

• Experience Journey Mapping: Visualizes user interactions within applications, highlighting common paths and performance issues;
• Mobile RUM: Provides session analytics, tracking user engagement from gestures to code execution;
• Browser RUM: Monitors user activity on web-based applications in real time;
• Browser Synthetic Monitoring: Uses cloud-based agents to simulate and track user interactions across applications;
• IoT Monitoring: Analyzes device and user behavior through machine learning-powered transaction data analysis.

These features work alongside AppDynamics’ broader monitoring tools to create a comprehensive performance management solution.

ControlUp DEX

ControlUp’s digital employee experience management platform provides real-time monitoring of endpoints, virtual desktops, online, and SaaS apps. It gives insight into servers, workstations, apps, and user activity, allowing IT professionals to effectively diagnose performance issues.

The ControlUp DEX platform includes three core products:

• ControlUp Real-Time DX: Enables IT administrators to monitor user experience in real time, analyze performance metrics, and proactively resolve issues like slow logins or application delays;
• ControlUp Edge DX: Focuses on endpoint monitoring for Windows, macOS, and Linux devices, collecting real-time data, generating reports, and enabling remote issue resolution;
• ControlUp Scoutbees: Uses synthetic monitoring to continuously track the availability of applications, desktops, and network resources, allowing IT teams to detect and address outages quickly.

ControlUp also offers free utilities for digital experience management, including tools for monitoring NetScaler systems, managing IGEL devices, and analyzing application load times.

Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform designed to give IT and DevOps teams complete visibility into their application infrastructure, regardless of scale. With over 600 integrations, it consolidates metrics and events from various systems, applications, and services. The platform enables organizations to track distributed system requests and monitor application performance using open-source tracing libraries.

Datadog automatically generates service overviews, allowing IT teams to analyze performance through real-time graphs, logs, and alerts based on error rates or latency metrics. Its end-user experience monitoring features include:

• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Provides insights into application performance from the user’s perspective by correlating data with logs, traces, and backend metrics;
• Synthetic Monitoring: Uses script-free testing to simulate user interactions and monitor network endpoints;
• Continuous Testing: Offers tools to automate software testing throughout the application lifecycle;
• Session Replay: Captures and replays user browsing sessions to diagnose usability issues;
• Error Tracking: Helps IT teams identify, assess, and resolve application errors efficiently.

Datadog also supports interactive dashboards that display real-time metrics and alerts. IT teams can configure complex notification triggers to detect performance issues at both individual host and large-scale cluster levels. The platform integrates with third-party applications through its API.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an AI-powered observability platform that offers infrastructure monitoring, APM, DEM, security analytics, and cloud automation. Its AI-powered analytics enable IT staff to identify and rectify performance issues before they affect end users. The platform collects logs, analytics, and traces, providing detailed visibility into application operations.

The Digital Experience module is an essential component of Dynatrace, assuring application availability and functioning across web, mobile, and IoT platforms. The key features include:

• Grail Analytics: AI-powered insights built on a large-scale data lakehouse for comprehensive observability;
• RUM: Tracks user interactions across digital transactions, allowing IT teams to replay sessions, analyze transaction performance, and gauge business impact;
• Synthetic Monitoring: Uses a web-based recorder to track business transactions, benchmark site performance, and evaluate application responsiveness;
• Mobile Monitoring: Provides real-time insights into mobile application performance, showing dependencies between components and crash analytics powered by AI diagnostics;
• Dynatrace also includes OneAgent, a single-agent technology for collecting application and infrastructure metrics with minimal setup, and PurePath, a distributed tracing tool for analyzing code-level issues. Smartscape provides dynamic topology mapping to visualize dependencies across applications and infrastructure.

EG Innovations – EG Enterprise

EG Enterprise is a cloud-based IT monitoring solution designed for both modern and legacy applications. It supports on-premises, hybrid cloud, and virtualized systems, offering a centralized platform for tracking application and infrastructure performance.

The platform includes built-in digital experience monitoring (DEM) capabilities with features such as:

• EG Universal Monitor: Allows administrators to oversee applications, operating systems, storage, and virtualized systems;
• RUM: Uses an agentless approach to monitor user transactions in real time without requiring software installation on endpoints;
• Synthetic Transaction Monitoring: Simulates user transactions to proactively measure application performance and detect potential issues.

Administrators can use a mix of agent-based and agentless monitoring, simulate and replay client sessions, and track multi-step interactions with web applications. The platform also uses machine learning to correlate performance data across infrastructure components, establishing baselines and identifying potential problems before they disrupt operations.

Nexthink Infinity

Nexthink Infinity is a cloud-based platform launched in 2022, designed to provide IT teams with analytics, automation, and remediation capabilities. It uses machine learning and benchmarking to diagnose issues, identify root causes, and resolve device-related problems. The platform enhances visibility across IT and proactively detects employee experience issues.

Nexthink Infinity enables IT teams to manage and remediate large-scale workspaces by focusing on three core functions:

• Real-Time Alerting: Detects employee experience issues proactively, with customizable alerts for different digital experience metrics. IT teams receive instant notifications for critical problems;
• Diagnostics and Analytics: Uses AI-driven analysis to determine the root cause of issues by assessing real-time telemetry data. It captures event-level details related to devices, applications, and networks;
• Automation and Remediation: Automates issue resolution with an extensive library of one-click remediation actions and supports custom scripts. Employees also receive self-service troubleshooting options to reduce IT workload.

Additional capabilities include real-time alerts, troubleshooting tools powered by pattern recognition, and Experience Central, a scoring system for digital experience assessment.

Raygun

Raygun provides a set of monitoring tools for tracking web and mobile application performance. The platform includes three primary components: Application Performance Monitoring, Crash Reporting, and Real User Monitoring. IT teams can analyze application access patterns, identify performance issues, and triage support requests efficiently.

The Real User Monitoring feature offers insights into front-end performance, allowing administrators to:

• Analyze slow-loading pages and performance bottlenecks;
• Diagnose issues at an individual instance level;
• Use a waterfall breakdown to assess component load times.

Raygun supports multiple programming languages, including React, Angular, JavaScript, Xamarin, iOS, and Android.

Key use cases for Raygun’s Real User Monitoring include:

• Trend Monitoring: Tracks changes in application performance based on page views, virtual pages, and XMLHttpRequest network calls;
• Performance Issue Diagnosis: Identifies and troubleshoots application performance issues;
• User Experience Analysis: Analyzes user sessions to verify performance metrics and understand user interactions.

Administrators can create project or team dashboards for immediate visibility into performance KPIs and service-level agreements (SLAs). Raygun integrates with various third-party applications and complies with industry standards like GDPR and HIPAA.

Riverbed Alluvio Aternity

Alluvio Aternity is a digital experience management platform that collects and analyzes technical telemetry from devices, applications, and cloud services. IT teams can install the Aternity agent on endpoints to monitor real user experience and system performance.

The platform combines IT service benchmarking, device performance monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and end-user experience monitoring (EUEM). Key functions include:

• Automatic Discovery: Identifies applications, tracks usage, and scores performance based on errors, crashes, wait times, and load times;
• User Tracking: Analyzes what users see when interacting with applications, segmenting response times across client devices, networks, and backend services;
• Change Validation: Compares user experience before and after infrastructure or application updates, allowing IT teams to assess changes’ impact;
• Self-Healing Capabilities: Enables administrators to create and modify automation scripts for resolving common device and user issues automatically.

Change validation is particularly useful for reducing risks associated with IT updates, while trend analysis helps organizations track application adoption and quantify the financial impact of performance issues.

SolarWinds Pingdom

Pingdom is a web application monitoring solution within the SolarWinds APM suite, providing insights into application health and performance. IT teams can monitor web applications across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, including Azure and AWS.

Pingdom operates as a SaaS-based platform, offering centralized visibility across IT infrastructure. Features include:

• Real User Monitoring (RUM): Tracks user experience based on browser type, device, and geographic location. Admins can compare historical usage trends and measure performance against KPIs and SLAs;
• Synthetic Monitoring: Monitors uptime, analyzes page speed, and tracks complex user transactions. A web recorder captures user interactions, allowing administrators to convert them into scripts for testing;
• Customizable Alerts: Configurable notifications for HTTP status changes, content modifications, and error messages.

The platform facilitates root cause analysis through visual reports and integrates with third-party applications via webhooks, and supporting tools like Slack, HipChat, and PagerDuty.

Conclusion

EUEM allows IT departments to monitor application performance, network stability, and system responsiveness. As organizations rely more on cloud services and remote work, traditional monitoring solutions frequently fall short of detecting user experience concerns.

A structured EUEM approach with real user monitoring, endpoint tracking, and synthetic testing helps detect bottlenecks, reduce downtime, and improve digital interactions. Choosing the right solution is key to maintaining efficiency and ensuring a reliable user experience.