User experience is a critical part of the technology experience in 2017. As business moves from static experiences of previous decades and commerce becomes a critical piece of the shopping journey, organizations must acquire the appropriate infrastructure. If applications and infrastructure perform poorly, money will be left on the table and customers will go to other competitors.
For IT, understanding the user experience is becoming increasingly challenging as technology evolves. Even as applications are deployed through a variety of platforms and devices, organizations need to find ways to monitor user experience. In this blog, we explore three common approaches that are being used in the industry today.
- Real User Monitoring: Passive in nature, this method leverages the gathering of data through the browser to accurately determine application performance including load time, dwell time, and exit. Monitoring at this level involves the pasting of JavaScript code which works with the content delivery network (CDN) to deliver the appropriate content. The advantages of Real User Monitoring provide the organization with user behavior information. Depending on the platform, this type of information can also be delivered in real-time.
- Server-Side Monitoring: Application monitoring on the server side is also a helpful way to track user experience. This works through agent-based monitoring for acquiring and transmitting data to watch user interactions in real-time such as slowness or application bugs. With the right tools applied, DevOps and IT teams can isolate performance issues to the level of specific application code and monitor specific hardware performance.
- Synthetic Transaction Monitoring: Finally, IT can also use synthetic transaction monitoring which simulates the activities of an end-user which can involve the use of external agents that execute pre-recorded scripts. These types of monitoring are very light and rarely disrupt the user experience. However, since the monitoring doesn’t actually monitor the activities of real end users, one’s ability to succeed with this methodology can be limited.
How does your organization monitor its end users? Share your thoughts in the comments below and let us know.
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