Dramatic title right? well, it's a pretty dramatic topic. When you choose to not monitor the digital experience, you're sort of slamming the door on your user's face...you're being selfish! DEM stands for Digital Experience Monitoring or, if you're paying attention, Management. It's the idea of understanding your user experience and how it's perceived by your users. Your site could be running beautifully on a few EC2 instances using almost no CPU or memory but, if the users can't get to what they're looking for, that efficiency is undercut by a bad user experience. That's when you get all sorts of post on forums and social media saying, "Your website is terrible" or, "You need a new IT team". You can talk to those disgruntled users and try to get screenshots, a customer ID, steps to reproduce (and you probably should) but, this isn't going to help you long term. You probably figured out APM (Application Performance Monitoring) a while back and can at least detect if a server goes down...lets tackle the experience.
Am I Using DEM?
This is DEM.
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We've had a lot of followers stop by and ask us for help understanding the difference between synthetic user data, and real user data. While we don't have all the answer and specific use cases will depend a bit on your product, I'll break it down into 3 parts to get you started and if you've got more questions after, you know how to find me! When Is Synthetic Data Useful?Synthetics are basically automated test scripts that run through your application and perform various test scenarios to determine if you site is working as expected. Because they are pre-recorded bots, they make a few assumptions that would be hard to make when looking at real user data. These assumptions allow you to focus on specific KPIs by removing some white noise. synthetic scenarios are often considered clean room or happy path tests. Assumptions Made
Synthetic users allow you to understand the user experience from a technical side. If my flow makes sense and my content is on point, users will be happy with my site because the page load times are good, content is rich but well-compressed, and key flows have been up and operational all day. Because of that, frequent synthetic runs are a good way to see if key parts of your site are operational without having to wait for real users to try using them. When is Real User Data Useful?It's hard to not see the value of real user data upfront and with synthetics explained earlier in this write-up, this should be pretty straight-forward but, let's dive in anyways! Real users are best for understanding patterns and trends but, they can also be used for some real deep-dives into edge cases and even for 1 on 1 customer support. Example Use Cases
How Can Synthetics and Real Users Work Together?Real user data is collected as application users interact with your website and takes into account every click, mouse-over, aimless back and forth...well, it takes everything into account. As a result, it's a lot to sift through or reliably digest without a good baseline. Synthetics establish that baseline for you by measuring the "happy path" for that same scenario. If a synthetic user gets through the flow without issue, the problem is not in the application itself but, maybe in the experience. Is the user confused? Is the right information being given? Is the price too high?
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AuthorMr. BizDevOps is our resident expert on all things BizDevOps and because he's always going on about a bunch of random stuff - we gave him a blog on our site so he could share it with the world. Archives |
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