To remain efficient and effective, IT teams require strong, reliable applications that provide consistent and secure access to data—the organization’s lifeblood. These applications must be closely monitored for high performance, good availability, and consistent reliability.
Unfortunately, it’s often hard to track applications, and traditional monitoring makes it challenging to get a true view of the end-user’s experience. Observing applications has become more difficult due to the complexity of modern environments and end-user diversity, including work-from-anywhere (WFA) employees. For example, many applications reside in the cloud and are accessed online. Another modern-day challenge is the use of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) personal technology.
With the adoption of digital solutions into all facets of our work lives, traditional monitoring tools can no longer adequately and efficiently track applications. Organizations must evolve and enhance their methods to ensure positive user experiences and improved results.
DEM: A New Approach for Monitoring Applications
Focused on the end-user experience, digital experience monitoring (DEM) is an approach to application monitoring. Traditional service level agreements (SLAs) only guarantee uptime without regard for functionality or performance. These types of SLAs rarely consider the user’s experience or whether the application works properly.
This is why organizations have turned to experience-level agreements (XLAs) that redefine application monitoring from an end-user perspective. Unlike SLAs, XLAs focus more on the end-to-end health of the application and the service. For instance, an SLA may guarantee an application is nearly 100% available. In contrast, an XLA ensures that WFA users have an identical experience whether working on-site or remotely within an application.
Appraising applications based on end-user experiences and XLAs elevates application monitoring from only assessing if the application is running to ensuring all devices, connections, and interfaces involved are effective and productive. This change typically involves various data collectors, including operating system (OS) agents, application programming interfaces (APIs), and generic troubleshooting tools. This can be a highly complex endeavor without direct access to all the systems involved.
The Benefits of DEM
DEM is a tool designed to collect and correlate data across complicated environments. It is heavily reliant on third-party components. A well-designed DEM solution uses different data-gathering methods and regular synthetic workload tests to glean in-depth knowledge of each component affecting the end-user’s experience. The harvested information typically indicates trends over time. It can be used to generate alerts when a problem arises, providing correlated information to help pinpoint exact causes and help in remediation.
Addressing Problems Quickly
Bad end-user experiences will frequently and negatively affect an organization’s revenue and reputation. Often, remediating an issue is a manual process done by an individual following basic instructions. Unfortunately, repairing the problem was initiated long after it took place. Fixing most issues requires situation-specific understanding.
Finding the root cause of a problem that affects an XLA starts as soon as it is identified. An outstanding monitoring tool will automatically diagnose and remediate application issues. It will help with both the manual aspects of troubleshooting and contextual factors. The best monitors can even execute application-specific commands like SQL queries to understand what is happening within the application.
Automation Remediation
Using all available data, a good DEM solution offers suggestions on remediation to improve the mean time to remediation. When an organization first uses DEM, these suggestions are based on common problems and remediations extracted from a database. However, as new issues are discovered, repaired, and followed within the organization’s instance, the suggestions become more specific to the environment and include proven resolutions.
As more issues are identified, the DEM suggestions become more precise. This allows back-end engineers to automate corrections given to frontline help desk experts. This enables them to solve problems quickly, often with just one click. If a common issue has a common solution and the automation works consistently over time, it can be configured to execute automatically without human intervention.
Renewed Focus on Data Gathering
Today’s applications are more complicated and less visible; therefore, IT teams require new monitoring tools. The transition to XLS standards demands a refocus on data gathering across all components in delivering applications to end-users so that all the information can be correlated and concerns can be identified quicker.
FortiMonitor is the Fortinet DEM solution. It allows organizations to move from legacy monitoring tools to a more user experience-focused solution. After it is in use for a while, FortiMonitor will begin to identify common problems, automatically collect troubleshooting data, suggest corrections, and automate remediation activities. This approach dramatically minimizes the negative impacts issues have on the user experience. As a result, organizations maintain better XLAs and ensure that users can easily access data.
FortiMonitor is vendor agnostic and is integrated with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and unified SASE solutions for increased visibility.
Learn more about FortiMonitor, Fortinet’s trailblazing DEM solution, here.