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Tag: digital experience

  • Digital Experience and the Future of Observability

    Digital Experience and the Future of Observability

    Over the past two years, there’s been significant hype around observability in the IT operations and DevOps world. As shorthand for providing better insights, observability has seen a rise in lockstep with distributed architectures, cloud-native applications and the increasingly complex IT environments associated with them.

    As we round out 2022 and move into the new year, there’s evidence observability is gaining mainstream adoption by IT operations and has begun to take off, with the market reaching a better understanding of what observability is and why it matters. This broader adoption offers a moment to reflect on the impact of observability so far and how it will continue to evolve in the year ahead.

    What is Observability?

    Though there’s ongoing debate in the industry about what observability actually means and what an observability platform should include, most people in the industry will argue observability is the evolution of monitoring and promises to offer more complete answers than standalone monitoring. Gartner, for example, first asserted in 2020 observability is “the evolution of monitoring.” But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and observability and monitoring will continue to coexist and fill distinct needs for different teams based on what information they need about their environments and how they need to act on it.

    So far, observability has had the most considerable impact on application performance and digital experience monitoring.

    The days of monolithic applications are over. Instead, modern applications are highly distributed, are built natively in the cloud using container technology, are organized around microservices and leverage databases in multiple cloud environments. These increasingly distributed software stacks have introduced enormous flexibility for developers but huge complexity for operations teams, making it harder to deliver an optimal experience to the end user. The DevOps teams tasked with building and managing custom web applications are under pressure, and the result is, as one recent article so concisely put it, “Devs don’t want to do ops.”

    Observability has provided a welcome respite for DevOps teams who need intelligent visibility into their environments to determine how applications are performing. This has made application performance a key focus for many observability providers.

    An Intolerance of Bad Digital Experience

    Ensuring external customer-facing applications are performing optimally is the key driver behind this. Digital businesses with external applications core to the company’s success need to ensure those applications perform optimally—customers are fickle. They’re intolerant of bad digital experiences, and alternatives are plentiful. Any e-commerce vendor knows no website equals no sales.

    Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools look at telemetry to flag application issues or outages needing to be addressed. But understanding the health of your applications from this narrow standpoint isn’t the same as understanding how the applications perform from a user perspective. In other words, if you aren’t considering how applications are performing (or not!) for customers, employees and other users, you’re not seeing the forest for the trees. Observability helps solve this by elevating APM into a more holistic digital experience approach by adding visibility into how the end user engages with your application.

    By providing a view into how an application is performing with the context of what’s happening throughout the entire stack—including networks, databases, systems, and more—and how issues are impacting the user experience, DevOps teams can shed light on previous blind spots.

    Elevating the importance of digital experience through observability enables teams to understand and respond to issues more efficiently and provides critical data to help DevOps teams further improve their apps beyond just debugging and issue remediation. By understanding how users engage with and experience the application, you can gather critical data to improve or simplify the digital user experience. In our e-commerce example above, this could mean fewer clicks or an easier checkout experience (better digital experience = more sales).

    Cloud migration efforts, coupled with ongoing hybrid and remote work and understaffed tech teams, make prioritizing what matters most even more important. Focusing on the experience of the end user—but with end-to-end visibility across the environment—allows stretched DevOps teams “do more with less.”

    2023 Will be the Year of Digital Experience Observability

    An observability approach prioritizing digital experience is the first step toward building a complete customer-centric environment. This eliminates the potential risks of missing issues directly impacting application performance and creates an enhanced, complete experience for every user. This will make 2023 the year of digital experience observability.

  • Cloudflare Adds Digital Experience Monitoring to CDN Portfolio

    Cloudflare Adds Digital Experience Monitoring to CDN Portfolio

    At an online CIO Week event, Cloudflare today added a digital experience monitoring capability to a portfolio of services layered on top of its core content delivery network (CDN).

    Corey Mahan, director of product management for Cloudflare, said the Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service extends a Cloudflare Zero Trust platform based on agent software dubbed Cloudflare WARP. The solutions delivers a wide range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings spanning everything from data loss prevention (DLP) to email security.

    He added that the overall goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by delivering SaaS application services more efficiently using a single agent rather than having to deploy multiple agents for each service.

    The Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service, available as a private beta, will enable IT teams to leverage the Cloudflare CDN to measure and analyze controlled data flows to public or private resources by emulating traffic flows using synthetic data. Via integration with the Cloudflare Zero Trust platform, IT teams can also access real-time data visualizations highlighting anomalies in connectivity or performance that might, for example, be indicative of a security breach, noted Mahan.

    While there’s no doubt IT organizations are looking to streamline the number of IT vendors they need to manage, it’s not clear what the center of gravity will be for achieving that goal. Cloudflare is making a case for using the same global CDN that many organizations already rely on for networking services.

    The Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service leverages the company’s CDN to make it simpler to understand, for example, why users in one geography experience sub-optimal application experiences compared to another, said Mahan. That’s especially critical when more organizations than ever have employees working from home across multiple geographies, he added.

    In the longer term, more networking and security functions will be consumed as a service. The challenge then becomes integrating those services into the DevOps workflows that are employed to deploy applications across a highly distributed computing environment. In many cases, what might initially appear to be an application performance issue winds up being a network connectivity problem that is more easily solved.

    One way or another, the management of IT services in the months and years ahead will continue to converge. Organizations of all sizes will need to determine whether it makes economic sense to acquire platforms they need to manage versus consuming a service that is managed on their behalf. Most of the time, a service will be easier to consume and free up resources that can be applied to other IT functions, such as application development.

    Of course, organizations will also need to take care to avoid locking themselves into a specific services provider. Ultimately, however, the question is whether managing a specific IT function provides enough differentiated value to be worth the time and effort when there is so much more to do.

  • Best Practices for Digital Experience Management

    Best Practices for Digital Experience Management

    The COVID-19 pandemic put digital services in the spotlight. The winners in 2020 and beyond will be those organizations which provide awesome user experiences for online products, services and apps. There is scant room for error, as digital leaders before the pandemic have upped their game even more.

    For example, streaming service provider Netflix’s 2020 Q4 revenue reached $6.64 billion – almost $14 million more than expected – and added 8.5 million paid subscribers. The company had more than 200 million users in the quarter and saw viewership for non-English titles jump 50% during the year as U.S. viewers sought new content from around the globe.

    Companies in more traditional sectors, such as restaurants and hospitality, also grew by investing further in digital strategies. Chipotle’s 2020 revenue increased 7.1% to $6 billion, with digital sales skyrocketing 174.1% and accounting for more than 46% of sales. Target’s digital sales increased 155% in Q4 while Costco grew e-commerce sales by 91% in FY20, as online ordering and curbside pickup became the new normal.

    Digital Experience Monitoring Basics

    To manage this onslaught of online customers and transactions, IT organizations are turning to digital experience monitoring (DEM). DEM is a broad area, but it comes down to delivering the best experience for your customers and employees by monitoring your IT assets and addressing issues that arise before they become problems. DEM allows you to mimic and test the end-to-end customer and worker experience. Such solutions can be used in on-premises data centers or run in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

    There are two key methods for DEM:

    Real user monitoring (RUM): This entails using real users’ devices to measure the performance of a page. A script is injected on each page to measure data on page load performance for every request made, monitoring the interaction of an application and the users. The data shows such aspects as how an application is being used and the geographic distribution of users.

    Synthetic monitoring: This technique tests the performance of a page using an automation tool rather than users’ actual experiences. Scripts are used to simulate how a user might move through a web application and then reports are created based on that performance.

    In a recent report, Gartner analysts said DEM products are evolving, moving from a focus on performance and availability to correlating infrastructure and operations (I&O) and business outcomes. Currently, fewer than 15% of digital business initiatives will require I&O leaders to report on business metrics from digital experience; that will jump to 70% by 2025, Gartner says.

    For years, organizations have been using monitoring tools to measure various aspects of their infrastructure. For example, IT operations management (ITOM) solutions track metrics and manage alerts and events for infrastructure hosted on-premises or in the cloud, including servers, networking systems, storage appliances and databases. The data also can be used for historical data analysis and to map out trends.

    DEM is specifically focused on the end user experience, giving IT professionals the visibility to run diagnostics, fix issues and measure performance at each point of contact between the users and the application. Acquiring a new customer is an expensive effort, and a customer can be lost because of a single poor experience. DEM is designed to ensure the optimal experience.

    Getting Started with DEM

    There are two common approaches for implementing DEM:

    Point tools: Domain-specific monitoring tools track and measure different layers of the technology stack, such as networks and applications. The upside to this approach is you get more in-depth coverage from the point tools, but it can lead to tool sprawl, which impairs visibility and increases costs.

    Platform: This approach provides native monitoring for many areas and integrates with other tools, as needed, to deliver a central, unified view that makes it easier to see everything at once. However, it doesn’t include best-of-breed performance or the deepest analysis capabilities you will want in every area.

    An important first step is to identify the metrics and outcomes priorities for your organization. Then spend time researching the proper toolset for the goals you want to achieve. If you decide on deploying multiple single-domain monitoring tools, remember that you will need an integration strategy. The tools will need to easily share data and display that centrally, to deliver a holistic view of digital experience. Integration is also critical for troubleshooting and connecting metrics to a specific business service. You also will need subject matter experts in these technology domains who can ensure that the DEM tool(s) keep pace with advancements in IT infrastructure and development technologies.

    The Future of Digital Experience Monitoring

    The DEM field is evolving, with more parts of the I&O stack coming under its purview. Solutions will offer more capabilities and be easier to integrate out of the box with other tools because the end-to-end flow doesn’t stop with monitoring and collecting metrics. ITOps staff need to take action on critical alerts with efficient workflows and intelligent recommendations. AIOps and machine learning analytics are playing a growing role here.

    DEM can reduce time-to-value for customers and workers, simplify and ease onboarding to new sites and apps and ultimately increase interactions and sales. Advanced solutions can fuel predictive analytics, form a deeper understanding of user behavior to optimize websites and apps in step with user requirements and dynamic infrastructure changes. In a digital-centric world, DEM capabilities are critical to the health and future of organizations in every sector.

  • Top 4 Challenges for Developer Teams in 2021

    Top 4 Challenges for Developer Teams in 2021

    As remote work continues into 2021, developer teams are still navigating the new landscape for working across distributed teams and how this new way of working affects product delivery. In particular, there are several key challenges that every developer must face this year, including adapting to new tools and workflows internally, balancing the prioritization of keep-the-lights-on initiatives with product initiatives, and understanding how to address emerging customer challenges.

    As developer teams are responsible for keeping both internal systems healthy and maintaining service uptime for customers, addressing these issues and implementing the strategies below will help ensure better delivery, easier deployment of application and software solutions and improved internal communication processes.

    #1 Get Better at Digital Experience Monitoring

    For businesses to survive in this current environment, neglecting to monitor a user’s digital experience across their life cycle can mean losing business to a competitor. At a bare minimum, developer teams must ensure that their application’s basic infrastructure is sound. This means monitoring key metrics like CPU load, memory load, memory used, disk space, queue lengths, API uptime or error codes returned.

    For a fuller user experience, developer teams should also monitor things like page or app load times, drop-off points in an app and crash logs. The third level of digital experience monitoring is keeping tabs on what your users are doing, such as skipping the onboarding flow, inviting friends to your app, posting content or how much total time they’re spending within the app. Robust digital experience monitoring will ensure that you are constantly measuring the quality of your users’ experience and making improvements along the way.

    #2 Expand Where and How You Gather User Feedback

    Beyond initial user monitoring, teams should continuously collect feedback to improve features and fix issues that might not have been discovered during testing. One natural way to do this is to aggregate user reviews and support questions to find common themes that may help product teams prioritize future releases. It is also critical to think outside of the box in terms of where and how feedback is collected. Teams can also collect feedback in other ways, such as conducting data analysis and user research sessions or having direct conversations with customers. Giving key beta users early access to a new release can also help developer teams understand whether their application is meeting users’ needs, and whether it is intuitive to use.

    Ultimately, by engaging with customers in extensive and real conversations, teams may learn where there are disconnects between users and the products, and what they can do to bridge this gap. Once the information is collected, teams should then prioritize what needs to be done first by ranking requests by frequency received, financial value of fixing the issue, strategic importance to the overall organization and engineering effort.

    #3 Prioritize Low-Code and Customer Self-Service Models

    Removing barriers to entry for customers is especially critical right now, as developers consider changing user needs, tighter budgets and fewer personnel to implement new code. Customers just don’t have time for entire enterprise sales and onboarding cycles to implement new solutions, so requiring less code is a great way to introduce a more self-service model. This model is also great for non-developers to implement and ensures that customers (whether fellow developers or even someone on a marketing operations or web team) can easily integrate new tools and software into their existing solutions. This is not only critical for those without a more technical background, but also valuable for time-strapped product teams who want to buy, versus build, a new feature.

    #4 Codify Hiring to Help Developer Teams Succeed

    During the pandemic, both large companies and small startups have pivoted significantly in the way they recruit and onboard engineering, DevOps and technical roles. Leaders of developer teams need to codify their hiring plans and put in place remote work strategies, especially with the hybrid working model that combines remote personnel with in-office staff.

    When hiring for remote teams, consider where individuals are located for both development and customer support purposes. Once you determine these core hubs, there should be guidelines in place to reduce the need for team members to work across major time zone differences. This can mean having a core software team in a centralized region that also overlaps with a major customer base, or having an engineering team located in a similar time zone to the design team for easier communication.

    Overall, the needs of each developer team will differ depending on the size of the company and the industry it serves. That’s why it’s critically important to adapt your systems and infrastructure accordingly. Furthermore, listening to and processing user feedback, building products that meet ever-changing customer demands and continuing to focus on team communications will help ensure long-term success in a post-pandemic world.

  • Build Better CX Across the Entire User Journey with AIOps

    Build Better CX Across the Entire User Journey with AIOps

    Ready or not, digital experiences are now the gateway to customers and the standard-bearer of a company’s brand. Yet, as apps become more distributed, more intelligent and more real-time, they continue to run on infrastructure that resides within on-prem data centers as well as multiple public clouds. This complexity is underscored by gaps across IT teams, leaving businesses, developers and operations teams working in silos without a single source of truth, exposing risks that can inflict not only severe damage to an application’s performance and reliability, but also eventually exposing the entire business. 

    For IT teams, understanding their applications is key. Not only are they the backbone of any organization, but they also hold invaluable data on customers and their decision-making habits. Having complete visibility is critical in today’s multi-cloud and hybrid cloud world.

    When IT teams are able to work quickly and intelligently, they consistently deliver a strong customer experience–avoiding the risk of creating opportunities for customer disengagement and abandonment. Recent research shows that nearly 84% of respondents said they have experienced problems with digital services. As a result, 40% reported switching suppliers due to a poor digital experience and 63% have actively tried to discourage others from using a service or brand if they have a bad digital experience.

    What’s the way forward and how can these existing silos be eradicated? 

    How to Build Better CX

    IT teams are faced with a conundrum–they’ve been asked to manage app complexity while simultaneously navigating operational silos that make collaboration, data exchange and problem resolution incredibly challenging. The way forward lies in a collaborative approach across traditionally siloed teams that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to uncover hidden bottlenecks and resolve issues before they can impact the end-user.

    Transformational CIOs need their teams–across app and infrastructure owners–to speak a common language rooted in what’s important to the application performance, user experience and the business impact. They need infrastructure decisions in service of the application, which will ultimately drive business performance. They also need application teams to be able to go deeper and quickly identify underlying infrastructure that may be contributing to poor application performance. 

    In order for true collaboration to take place, the first step is to increase visibility across the IT organization by providing a common view of correlated data across domains that provides contextualized insights to better collaborate and create a superior digital experience.  

    For application teams, this means gaining insight into the users’ most transited application journeys, helping to clearly identify application bottlenecks and abandonment and to triage efficiently. For the infrastructure teams, improved visibility means having insight into infrastructure constraints impacting app performance so that teams can correlate the user experience to any underlying infrastructure in real-time. Through this increased visibility and context, application and infrastructure teams can clearly identify respective action items and move swiftly to resolve the right issues, at exactly the right time.

    This notion of fill stack visibility and correlated insights that drive action is a mindset commonly referred to as AIOps.

    Enter AIOps

    While it may be true that the emergence of today’s modern application and infrastructure environments has provided the speed and flexibility professionals demand, the numerous services have unleashed a deluge of data on the enterprise IT environment. Automating tasks has helped teams to free up some bandwidth for operations and planning, yet automation alone is no match for today’s increasingly complex environments. What’s needed is a strategy focused on reducing the burden of mounting IT operations responsibilities, and surfacing the insights that matter most so that businesses can take the right action.

    So, what are forward-thinking IT professionals doing to stay ahead of the curve? 

    Many are applying an AIOps approach to the challenge of environment complexities. AIOps leverages advances in machine learning and AI to proactively resolve problems that arise in the application and infrastructure environment. This is so powerful because using AI to identify potential challenges doesn’t just help IT professionals get ahead of problems, it helps companies avoid revenue-impacting outages that jeopardize the customer experience, the business and the brand. What’s more, an AIOps strategy can provide:

    • Intelligent alerting that can be trusted to indicate an emerging issue. By ingesting data, AIOps platforms and technology can play a pivotal role in not just automating existing IT tasks, but identifying and managing new ones based on potential problems detected.
    • Automated root cause analysis and business impact assessment. With the help of AIOps technology, this can be achieved, providing increased agility in the face of potential service disruptions or threats, and without additional drain on resources.
    • Automated remediation for common issues. With an AIOps platform, it’s easy to not only automate remediation for known issues, but unknown issues, too. That’s because it can ingest data and also provide more intelligent insights as a result of it.

    The path forward is clear. Digital businesses are not only the future but they are today’s norm. Any IT leader looking to succeed needs to rethink their overall approach and embrace a future that includes complete visibility of their technology and application stack, and also a strategic approach that keeps their teams operating one step ahead of the curve.

    — Whitney Satin

  • The Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring

    The Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring

    One of the great ironies of DevOps is that the better you are, the less likely it becomes that anyone will ever see your best work. If the code is supremely elegant, the app runs flawlessly, the servers do not lag and users and managers rarely say anything because that is exactly the experience they expect.

    People become aware of you only when something goes wrong—and at that point, they are rarely full of compliments. The experience means everything to them.

    Digital experience is the foundation of how online companies compete in the contemporary global market. That is why digital experience monitoring (DEM) has been recognized by Gartner as the most significant foundational process within application performance monitoring (APM). DEM is designed to improve not only your app but the entire experience that the user has in interacting with your brand online.

    If you’re unfamiliar with the DEM category, check out my primer here.

    DEM is the technological response to one of the oldest problems in business: not being able to be everywhere at once. On the digital side, the challenges of delivering the best possible performance across the widest scope fall into three spheres:

    • The problem of divergent user tech
    • The problem of network propagation
    • The problem of splintered responsibilities

    Let’s take a closer look at how DEM engages with each problem on its own turf.

    Divergent User Tech

    The mobile OS wars have settled on two champions for the time being: iOS and Android. As of February, those two account for 99.6 percent of mobile sales. Of course, from a DevOps perspective, nothing is that easy.

    Within iOS, around 79 percent of devices are on iOS 10, and another 16 percent are on iOS 9. The other 5 percent are scattered across various earlier versions. On the Android side, version 6 Marshmallow has the largest share at 31.3 percent of the market, and there are a plethora of other versions out there. Then you have to worry about the mind-boggling variety of hardware.

    For every combination of device and OS running your app, there are also users going to your mobile website on a handful of browsers. The numbers for February 2017 show 55.2 percent of the market is on Chrome, and 29.84 percent are looking at you through Safari. That leaves 14.96 percent of the market to be divided up among the default Android browser, Opera Mini, IE (at 1.02 percent, as hard as that is to believe) and many other contenders. It is significant to note here that the market leader did not even exist five years ago, so any apps you build now must be designed to work on browsers that haven’t been invented yet.

    The second subset of problems within the user tech consideration is geographic variation. How your app runs on 4G LTE in the city will be very different from 3G in rural areas. While Atlanta was judged to be the fastest city in the nation with downloads averaging 16.9 Mbps, users in the capital of Washington, D.C., can only work at 9.2 Mbps.

    The final subset covers issues related to the connection medium: Wi-Fi, cellular data, NFC, Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiMAX, HSPA, EV-DO, etc. It should be clear that there may be wide variations in digital experience based on the connectivity medium of various features within your app.

    Network Propagation

    It is not always the user’s fault. Old-school IT support tends to start with that assumption, but there are times when the problem originates within your own network or results from network latency generated by external errors.

    Everything that is happening on your servers, from DDoS attacks to viral videos to presentations in the conference room, could impact the performance of your app. As microservices becomes the dominant design model, it has become more common to see distributed applications get hung up in communications across the network. How will you track down which team is at fault or even assign fault when communications between microservices break down? The bigger question is, how will you correlate what happened on the front end with what happened on the back end?

    Splintered Responsibilities

    The second set of problems implies the third, which has to do with establishing a more unified view of your digital experience beyond just the IT world or whichever departments are involved. If your app involves contractors or third parties, the bigger view is larger than your company itself.

    It takes a paradigm shift to see your app as a unified tool. You have to assign a central command that takes a unified approach to keeping internal and external teams in agreement. This is the level where a team will determine the proper processes to launch at a moment’s notice and mitigate the damage from issues in real time.

    A central command outpost running DEM is needed to ensure a swift diagnosis of the performance anomalies. Then the DevOps team can resolve the issues and deploy fixes with minimal disruption to whatever the end user wants to do. Ideally, you want to do it with zero downtime or at least an SLA of nine 9’s (0.0864 milliseconds of downtime per day).

    About the Author / Kevin Goldberg

    Kevin Goldberg works in marketing at SolarWinds working on the Monitoring Cloud team. Prior to SolarWinds, he worked at AppDynamics and WalkMe. Follow his ramblings on Twitter at @Kevin_Goldberg.