Today's businesses interact with their customers via software and applications, making applications the de facto face of the organisation.
So says Chris Kline, VP Product Management at CA, adding that the a brand loyalty isn't what it used to be, as customers are more demanding, and change brands more readily. "As a result, it's important that apps are not just always available they are totally functional too.
Today's businesses need to make sure their brands work perfectly, and are always available, and this is where digital experience monitoring comes in.
"Digital experience monitoring or DEM is not just about watching a single user clicking something one time, it's taking it one step further. It watches the totality of these things together, the collection, so you can figure out if your users are 'happy' or 'sad'. Remember, users don't care why it's not working, just that it's not. It impacts their relationship with that brand. CA is focusing on the journey that's not just about one transaction, but all of the transactions together that build a true picture of customer experience."
Total visibility
According to Kline, a DEM solution's job is to look deeper than the infrastructure, to why the customer experience is being affected. "You need to be able to see how the design is working or if it's not, and the same for the functionality. Where are the buttons? Can they be reached one handed? We take all that data, and from that, help the application owners craft and build, with a closed feedback loop, a better experience."
A digital experience monitoring solution must provide total visibility into applications, as well as virtual and physical infrastructure performance, adds Kline. It needs to identify application performance problems down to the root cause. They must enable the business to pinpoint, analyse and correct application performance issues so the business is always running with optimum resources.
He says there are three different areas from the user experience that need to be looked at. "If customer feedback is bad, it could mean poor design, bad code or an infrastructure problem. A DEM solution needs to figure out where the issue is, and root out exactly what caused the poor experience."
In terms of the DevOps chain, in the past issues were identified in the production stage. "Before production, you need to tick all the boxes and make sure all elements of the app are working. Today, application management is not just for the production stage, which is the most expensive and least beneficial place to fix any issues. Find and fix any issues before the goes to production - it's about prevention now. If we can provide feedback earlier in the lifecycle, we can save time and money."
Business vs technical
He says DEM is helping to join the worlds of IT and business. "Monitoring data becomes the common language that allows them to understand one another. We built it as an open platform to integrate all sources of data - this is the future. We are investing in connecting those things up, and exposing the pieces of data that make most sense for others to use, and then have drill down capabilities."
According to Kline, business speaks a different language to technical, and DEM helps to combine the 'outside in' and 'inside out' points of view. "We can take a user journey and tie it to an exact line of code. In this way, we are tying the business and IT worlds together, giving the business owners a better understanding of money being spent, and the techies a better view of user experience."
He says a digital experience platform needs to monitor and give diagnostic insights into applications across mobile, Web, cloud, micro services, containers and mainframe. The platform must know how all the bits connect, and create a skeleton view of how all the pieces fit together and interact, the systems, networks, infrastructure and suchlike.
CA's platform is introducing an assisted triage engine that works on top of the data collected. It aims to recognise patterns and automatically suggest the root cause. "The tool gathers evidence, providing expertise in the form of guided assisted triage workflows for in-depth, root-cause diagnostics across development and production applications, simplifying and speeding the time it takes to find and fix issues."
Future analytics
Kline predicts there will be a greater use of analytics, AI and machine learning that will affect the monitoring world enabling businesses to do more with less. "We need analytics to free up the smart people in the organisation, and make them more available to innovate, and problem solve. Eventually we want to build systems that use telemetry data, and can identify problems and take action without much human intervention."
Essentially, he says this will mean making the engine smarter. "Adding more data, adding more systems and adding systems, service, and network data, instead of just the application data. From this, we can take all the data and put it into common platforms, using open source technologies, and build a platform on top of them, and then use analytics on top of it. This is not just for IT purposes, but for business insights too. The data will become valuable far beyond its original intention," he concludes.
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