IT and software development teams use Digital Experience Monitoring, or DEM, to process, analyze, and optimize how their company’s employees engage with organizational IT infrastructure and other digital assets. DEM combines the critical features found in application performance management (APM) and end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) to create a more comprehensive solution gathering i acting upon insight into user experiences and interactions.
DEM solutions exist for both customer-facing products (if you’re a software provider) and employees (if you want actionable data on how employees use internal tools). However, this guide focuses specifically on DEM solutions for your internal teams. Your IT team should consider it can use DEM tools to maximize the effectiveness of your digital infrastructure and tools based on the data you collect from your end users’ experience.
This guide explores DEM in the following ways:
- Highlighted data on the top Digital Experience Monitoring solutions
- Detailed explanation covering why IT teams need DEM
- Tips on how to properly implement DEM at your company
7 Best Digital Experience Monitoring Solutions
The following providers offer the best DEM solutions for either external end-users, internal end-users, or both:
- ControlUp: This product provides real-time visibility into employee digital experiences in a way that helps IT teams quickly identify and resolve performance issues.
- Dynatrace: Provides fairly comprehensive visibility into your internal apps and infrastructure with AI anomaly detection tools.
- FortiMonitor: A product of Fortinet, this tool offers broad insights into application performance and user interactions to help your teams maintain productivity.
- Riverbed (formerly Alluvio Aternity): This solution will capture and analyze data from employees’ devices and apps to help give you more detailed insights into UX.
- Nexthink: This tool gives your IT team real-time analytics and automated solutions to address internal IT issues that impact the employee experience.
- AppNeta by Broadcom: Broadcom’s AppNeta tool offers network performance monitoring in a way that helps ensure internal apps and services are delivered efficiently across larger enterprise networks.
- Systrack: This service provides a comprehensive view of employee digital workspaces by giving admins deep insights into multiple factors affecting end-user experiences and productivity.
Digital Experience Monitoring Features Table
| Product/Features | ControlUp | Dynatrace | FortiMonitor | Riverbed | Nexthink | AppNeta by Broadcom | SysTrack |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Available upon request | Available upon request | Available upon request | Available upon request | Available upon request | Available upon request | Available upon request |
| Ideal Organization Size | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises | Mid to Large Enterprises |
| Real-Time Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Application Performance Monitoring (APM) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| User Experience Scoring | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automated Remediation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integration with ITSM Tools | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customizable Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free Trial/Demo Period | 21-Day Free Trial | 15-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial (Upon Request) | No Trial or Demo Period | No Free Trial or Demo Period | No Free Trial or Demo Period | No Free Trial or Demo Period |
Digital Experience Monitoring: Solutions Highlights
1. ControlUp
2. Dynatrace
3. FortiMonitor
4. Riverbed (formerly Alluvio Aternity)
5. Nexthink
6. AppNeta by Broadcom
7. Systrack
What Is Digital Experience Monitoring?
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is the practice of tracking, measuring, and analyzing the performance of your company’s digital services. This can include, but is not limited to, the websites, mobile apps, software platforms, and IoT devices that your company maintains.
When properly implemented, DEM gives IT teams deeper insights into how end-users interact with organizational infrastructure and assets. DEM can be customer-focused, employee-focused, or both. Many tools are available to help companies monitor digital experiences and focus either more on customers or more on employees. Depending on your needs, you’ll likely want to explore one or the other.
How Does Digital Experience Monitoring Work?
Employee-focused Digital Experience Monitoring revolves around connecting the multitude of data layers that exist within your company’s internal digital network. With DEM, you measure everything from endpoint performance on employees’ devices to application response times for collaboration tools and systems.
To work effectively, DEM requires fairly lightweight agents or monitoring scripts installed on your organization’s networks, virtual desktops, or individual devices. This helps your IT team capture and view real-time data on resource usage, network latency, and software performance, among other things.
DEM tools will aggregate this information into a central platform (and presumably a visually appealing dashboard) where it is available for analysis. Real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic monitoring, and application performance monitoring allow DEM tools to be both proactive and reactive.
Proactively, these tools can use synthetic tests to emulate common workflows, such as pulling up a shared drive or accessing your company’s HR portal. This action helps your team spot issues before they impact employees, making it a valuable process to have in place for new software implementations.
Reactively, DEM solutions help with real end-user performance issues. The deep-level diagnostics available through the software helps you drill down to understand endpoint health, network connectivity issues, and backend service statuses.
DEM for customers vs DEM for employees
The difficulty is determining the difference between DEM tools that focus on customer end-users and those designed for employees as the end user.
Customer-facing DEM tools tend to focus more on traditional UX, such as loading speeds, conversion funnels, or cart abandonment rates. The scale and scope of customer-facing DEM is also significantly larger (in most cases), meaning DEM tools for software or service providers is designed to handle larger datasets. Synthetic monitoring tends to be far more important for this type of DEM.
Conversely, employee-facing DEM solutions typically focus on employee workflows, productivity, activity, and the stability of internal tools. For example, the overall goal for DEM designed for employee experience monitoring seeks to determine how employees engage in day-to-day operations within the companies’ assets and how optimizations can be made to save the company money.
DEM tools can focus on customer end users or internal end users. This is an important distinction, as some DEM solutions may be  Traditional monitoring approaches often focus on infrastructure or internal metrics (like server CPU usage), but DEM broadens the scope to encompass the actual user experience, including page load times, transaction success rates, error frequencies, and end-to-end response times.
By putting the user’s interaction at the center, DEM provides holistic visibility into how external and internal factors—from front-end code issues to network latency and back-end bottlenecks—impact user satisfaction. Organizations rely on DEM to proactively identify performance issues, prioritize fixes based on user impact, and continuously optimize digital touchpoints to ensure a seamless experience.
Tips on How to Properly Implement DEM at Your Company
If you plan to roll out an employee-focused DEM solution, you may need to plan carefully and give yourself at least a year (or more) of buffer time. Particularly for widely distributed organizations, the implementation process may take months, especially if you’re trying to incorporate pre-existing infrastructure or digital assets that are not centrally located.
Here are several tips to help you properly implement DEM tools:
1. Define clear objectives and metrics
First, define why your company needs or wants a DEM and the specific business goals that it’s aligned with. For example, your organization may have shifted from in-person to fully remote but lost insight into employee productivity. Your objective may be to determine productivity rates based on the usage and update of specific tools within your company’s tech stack.
Make sure you have specific KPIs that you are tracking, as well.
2. Start small, then scale
Before you roll out DEM to your entire organization, pilot the DEM processes and tools on a smaller number of assets. If employees regularly complain about Microsoft Teams running slowly, you may focus your attention on monitoring Teams specifically.
From there, take an iterative approach. Collect your pilot data and refine your monitoring approach, update your alert thresholds, and build out your dashboards.
3. Integrate existing tools
The DEM tool you choose should be able to seamlessly integrate with the tools your IT team is already using, such as:
- Jira
- ServiceNow
- Jenkins
- GitLab
- Splunk
- Elk
Integration is essential to help you avoid data silos. You want a single source of truth for incident detection and resolution. Otherwise, you’ll have to navigate multiple tools and interfaces, limiting your visibility.
4. Prioritize user experience
Don’t let the business-aligned objective make you lose sight of why you really need DEM in the first place: end-user experience. The better the experience employees have with your infrastructure, the more likely you are to achieve your overall business goals for digital experience monitoring in the first place. User feedback loops are helpful here, as you can get a better understanding of both the qualitative and quantitative impact of your DEM.
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