The 5 Best Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Tools in 2023
Slow loading times, frequent downtime, and poor user experiences can negatively impact your business’s bottom line. After having a negative experience on a website, 88% of online consumers are less inclined to revisit the site. This statistic alone emphasizes the importance of finding a solution that can help measure and optimize the performance of digital systems.
Fortunately, there are digital experience monitoring tools available that can help solve this problem. With these tools, you can measure and optimize the performance of your digital systems and applications. In this article, we will cover the following:
- Selection criteria for a right digital experience monitoring tool
- Common mistakes to avoid when choosing a tool
- Five top digital experience monitoring tools
Factors To Consider When Selecting a Digital Experience Monitoring Tool
Understanding the factors to consider when choosing the tool can make your decision process easier and more effective. These factors will enable you to select the right digital experience monitoring tool tailored to meet your business’s needs and goals.
Technical Capabilities
A digital experience monitoring tool is crucial for improving application performance by tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as Average Page Load Time, Average Network Time, Session and User Details.
Suppose your business’s website is experiencing a decline in sales and customer engagement due to slow page load times and a high bounce rate. The right digital experience monitoring tool can help you detect the issue’s source, such as a misplaced third-party plugin, and quickly resolve it to improve the end-user experience.
Security and Compliance
When selecting a digital experience monitoring tool, it’s crucial to prioritize security and compliance. Industry certifications and standards such as SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA ensure a secure system. By utilizing these measures, you can mitigate the risk of incurring hefty penalties and legal ramifications, as exemplified by Meta’s €413 million fine in the EU for breaching GDPR.
Security and compliance best practices enable your business to gain users’ trust. They appreciate the transparency in your procedures and get peace of mind knowing their data and interactions with your applications are secured.
Ease of Use
A steep learning curve for a digital experience monitoring tool means investing significant time to see ROI. Easy-to-use tools enable quick navigation. A must-have is an intuitive interface with seamless integration options and customizable reports for valuable insights.
Common Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing a DEM Tool
Choosing the wrong DEM tool can be costly for your business, resulting in poor performance, a high user churn rate, and lost revenue. However, knowing these common mistakes will help you select the best tool for your business.
Not Considering the Integration With Existing Systems
Integrating with tools like Slack and Asana can help quickly communicate app errors to your dev team. Check the tool’s list of supported integrations and consider if you need a third-party tool. Ask the support team about compatibility and available resources, such as training and implementation support.
Focusing Solely on Cost
Choosing a digital experience monitoring tool based only on cost is a mistake. Cheaper options may lack the necessary functionality, and affordable options can become costly in the long run. Consider the long-term value and essential features like issue detection, minimizing downtime, and driving business growth.
Overlooking Scalability
If a DEM tool can’t handle spikes or reductions in demand, it could lead to missed opportunities, revenue loss, or damage to your reputation.
Top 5 Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Tools
Digital experience monitoring tools enable you to get real-time insights into the performance of your digital applications and services. However, various DEM software suits different use cases, including end-to-end visibility into infrastructure performance and rapid diagnosis of business-critical websites. In this post, we have covered the following DEM tools:
- appNeura
- Glassbox
- Dynatrace
- Centreon
- Catchpoint
appNeura
AppNeura is a cloud-based application performance monitoring solution that helps businesses monitor and optimize their critical applications’ performance in real time.
With appNeura, businesses can monitor the performance of their applications across different platforms, environments, and geographies to gain real-time insights into application performance issues.
- AppNeura is designed to help software development teams quickly identify and fix mobile application errors.
- AppNeura is tailored toward technology companies that must ensure the reliability and performance of their software products.
- AppNeura’s products integrate with popular DevOps tools like GitHub, Slack, and Jira, making them ideal for DevOps teams.
- While appNeura can be used by large enterprises, it is specifically tailored towards small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have large IT teams.
- AppNeura can help businesses with customer-facing applications to identify and resolve errors quickly, ensuring a positive customer experience.
Key Benefits and Features Offered by appNeura
appNeura’s machine learning-based insights enable you to detect and correct issues that cause customer-facing application performance to degrade over time. Whether it’s slow 3rd party JS performance, image loading issues, or problems with Ajax requests, appNeura’s algorithms simplify the corrective action you need to take on your websites or applications. appNeura delivers several business benefits, including:
- 70-90% reduction in alerts, streamlining workflows and reducing alert fatigue.
- 30-50% optimization of ITOps through machine learning-based insights and real-time visibility.
- Reduced people dependency with AI-assisted insights and automated workflows, freeing up valuable resources
- Consolidated monitoring dashboards, simplifying the monitoring process and improving efficiency
- 40% reduction in resolution time with proactive monitoring and real-time feedback, enabling quicker issue identification and resolution
- Improved user experience and conversion rates across multiple user journeys
- Deep performance engineering expertise with a verified and proven knowledge base of solving over 4,500+ real-life complex IT operations and performance issues
ApDex Score for Application Health
appNeura monitors your app’s health and indicates the application’s health as an Apdex score. AppNeura holds a patent on ApDex. appNeura team recently modified the Apdex calculation. The modified Apdex score considers the number of app crashes and buffering instances during a session and subtracts them from the original formula.
Here’s the equation:
Apdex = (Satisfactory samples + 0.5xTolerating samples + 0xFrustrated samples – ?xApp crashes during a session – ?xBuffering instances on 4G)
The user can define the values of ? and ? to suit their requirements, ranging from 0.1 to 0.5, which helps to represent user experience on mobile applications correctly.
Web Vitals Monitoring
appNeura measures website metrics that deliver core insights into the user experience. While each website may have unique user experience requirements, the following metrics are critical to any web experience:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures the perceived load speed of main content.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures user experience with the first interaction.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability of visible content.
With appNeura, you can continuously monitor these core vital and gain insights to improve website performance, including SEO ranking. As you identify and address the areas that require improvement, you can ensure that your website delivers an optimal user experience to your visitors.
Automated Alerts
appNeura offers end-user monitoring and automated alerts by continuously gathering and analyzing data from networks, devices, servers, and applications. This provides granular insights via in-depth reports and enables developers to focus on coding and debugging while appNeura detects errors.
appNeura’s web browser monitoring product’s features include:
- Real user monitoring(RUM)
- Ajax user monitoring
- Session traces
- JavaScript error tracking
Event-Based Feedback on Mobile User Experience
Avekshaa SDK provides event-based feedback for mobile users to enable two-way communication. The SDK notifies users of buffering instances and sends buffering data every 15 seconds. If the buffering time exceeds the buffer threshold set in the product, an event is sent to the user’s mobile phone to notify them of a slow connection.
Informative and Intuitive Dashboards
CIOS can use appNeura’s intuitive dashboard to monitor user interactions in real-time. With a comprehensive overview of their customer’s journey on your app at a glance, you can quickly see the big picture and deliver better customer experiences.
Some highlights that appNeura’s dashboard provides include:
- Getting app report cards instantly with APDEX score.
- Viewing customer experience trends with a graph.
- Seeing app summaries with a hover of your mouse.
With appNeura, you no longer waste time sifting through unnecessary graphs, pie charts, and data to obtain critical information.
Actionable Insights
AppNeura offers comprehensive digital experience monitoring beyond surface-level data provided by other tools. It includes crash reports and detailed information about each page’s performance, including why critical metrics, such as bounce rate, may have changed.
With data available daily, weekly, or monthly, you can also conduct location-specific analysis to identify and address regional performance issues that may arise from network and user volume. This level of detail can help you quickly resolve problems and improve app performance.
Scalability
As the system grows, the number of errors and alerts can be overwhelming, increasing the difficulty for teams to manage and troubleshoot issues effectively. appNeura’s customizable notification system tailors alerts to the business’s specific concerns to reduce irrelevant notifications and efficiently improve scalability and issue management.
By segmenting users based on different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with appNeura, you can provide targeted services to specific groups. Customer segmentation helps your business scale and provides your support team with tailored information to proactively resolve customer issues.
Integrations with Other Tools and Platforms
appNeura offers seamless integration with popular product and customer relationship management tools such as Jira, Asana, and Freshdesk. This ensures you can efficiently deliver the best user experience while staying on top of your tasks.
Additionally, you can choose between various usage options, including cloud-based or on-premises, making finding a suitable network infrastructure platform that meets your specific needs easier.
Don’t wait until your users start complaining – let appNeura help you keep your end-user experience at peak performance. Request an in-person demo today!
Pricing
appNeura has a free trial and two paid versions. The advanced version allows 5,000 monthly active users, while the pro version allows 10,000. Pricing for digital experience monitoring varies based on the product and unit of measurement. For example:
- Web RUM product uses page views/session, with licensing units of 10 million views per year
- Mobile RUM is measured based on active users per month
- Synthetic monitoring is based on the number of transactions
Customer Review
appNeura reduces analysis time for metrics, such as DOM rendering, page load, and session time, from hours to minutes. You can check out more reviews here.
Glassbox
Glassbox is a platform that uses AI-driven tools to monitor digital experiences. It captures user activity on mobile apps and websites, helping organizations identify areas where customer experience can be improved in real-time.
Key Benefits Offered by Glassbox
Glassbox users love the platform because it can capture and analyze customer interactions across different channels, providing a solid solution for website and mobile app analytics. The platform has a user-friendly interface with easy-to-use visualizations and a responsive customer support team.
Replay user sessions
You can get instant replays of real-time sessions to better understand how and why your customers behave and optimize your digital experiences.
Access better feedback
Glassbox’s ‘Voice of Customer’ tool enables you to get actionable customer feedback that you can analyze, prioritize and turn into significant experience improvements.
A more colorful way to look at user interaction
Use Glassbox’s interaction maps to gain complete insight into your customers’ app engagement, understand their struggles, and improve content placement.
Pros
- Insightful heat maps that show which pages are performing well
- High level of detail for efficiently organizing analysis reports
Cons
- The Fast Forward feature’s x4 and x10 speed options don’t affect the functionality or user experience significantly
- Reporting capabilities could be enhanced to accommodate the custom requirements of businesses
Pricing
They offer several packages with a customizable option; however, you have to contact Glassbox support to request pricing.
Customer Review
You can read Glassbox’s reviews on G2.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace uses advanced AIOps to simplify cloud functions and enable faster, secure software delivery, ensuring superior digital experiences.
Key Benefits Offered by Dynatrace
Users love Dynatrace because it provides actionable insights into their applications’ performance to identify and resolve issues before they impact end users quickly. The platform’s automatic discovery and application dependencies mapping helps simplify troubleshooting and problem resolution.
Deliver omnichannel experiences
Use advanced mobile monitoring to continuously analyze customer segments, app crashes, and third-party components for better user interaction.
Get deeper insights into user journeys
Dynatrace enables developers to use log monitoring to identify unforeseen issues that can manifest in production.
Pros
- With its broad set of products, Dynatrace offers plenty of monitoring solutions
- Dynatrace allows users to customize monitoring solutions based on their business needs
Cons
- If you are only looking for digital experience monitoring, Dynatrace’s platform can be overwhelming as it has a lot of other capabilities
- Contacting support could prove difficult, particularly through chat, unless the inquiry is fundamental
Checkout top Dynatrace alternatives for small business.
Pricing
Dynatrace’s digital experience monitoring pricing begins at $11 monthly, providing 10,000 annual digital experience monitoring units.
Customer Review
You can read more reviews about Dynatrace on G2.
Centreon
Centreon is a software provider specializing in IT infrastructure monitoring, covering multi-cloud and user experience solutions.
Key Benefits Offered by Centreon
Users can centralize all their monitoring data in one place and streamline their workflow with Centreon’s ability to integrate with a wide range of tools and services. The platform’s reporting capabilities are a favorite among users, allowing them to generate detailed reports on various metrics and easily share them with other stakeholders. Centreon also provides flexibility and scalability for users to customize it to their specific needs as they expand their IT infrastructure.
Optimize IT Operations Total Cost of Ownership(TCO)
You can use Centreon’s platform to reduce the maintenance costs of an up-to-date monitoring environment while getting the flexibility of a SaaS offering.
Create your observability environment
Centreon’s open-source framework enables you to create a tailored observability platform by adding metrics based on your needs, with powerful indexing and search features.
Pros
- The platform sends alerts via its interface and emails the responsible team members
- Reliable for monitoring network devices like switches, routers and servers
Cons
- Some users complain that its pricing is costlier than its competition in the market
- Sometimes, the platform lags to show up or down indications of devices
Pricing
Centreon offers a free edition that users can use to monitor up to 100 devices. To add devices or functionalities, you need to contact their support to subscribe,
Customer Review
Check out Centreon’s reviews on G2.
Catchpoint
The Catchpoint platform offers complete, actionable insights and visibility into your digital ecosystem with multiple monitoring products and website-building tools.
Key Benefits Offered by Catchpoint
Catchpoint users love the platform’s alerting systems which provide timely and accurate notifications of performance problems, allowing them to mitigate any adverse impacts instantly. Catchpoint’s excellent customer support is always available to assist whenever needed.
Catch any issue in your Internet Stack
With Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring(IPM), you can dig deeper into the core elements of your Internet Stack to identify issues before they affect your business.
Reliable DevOps Lifecycle Support
Catchpoint supports DevOps by balancing business innovation and reliability. This support includes streamlined operations, experimentation culture, and increased automation to focus on value-based activities.
Pros
- Customer support is always available to help resolve issues and guide you on using the application
- You can quickly build new scripts or test further steps before full deployment
Cons
- Some users complain about the UI change and comfortability when using the dashboard
- Its JavaScript editor can be challenging, requiring most users to write with a third-party editor
Checkout some prominent Catchpoint alternatives.
Pricing
Catchpoint offers a 14-day free trial which you can access by filling out their form.
Customer Review
You can read Catchpoint’s reviews on G2.
Get Ahead of the Game with appNeura – Your Reliable Digital Experience Monitoring Tool
Implementing a digital experience monitoring tool in your systems is pivotal to improving user experience and customer retention; choosing the right one is just as important. After you consider the necessary factors and avoid the common mistakes, you’re set up to pick the tool tailored to your business’s needs and achieve your goals.
Sign up for a free trial today to learn how we can help you provide world-class customer experiences.