Got IT Complexity? Monitor the User Experience

It’s no secret that IT operations has changed a lot over the last decade or so. New technologies like cloud, virtualization, containers, and microservices have made applications and infrastructure more distributed, more efficient, and more flexible at the expense of predictability and manageability.

This is why technologies like Catchpoint’s have come to the forefront in recent years: with technology back ends increasingly out of IT’s hands or otherwise more challenging to monitor and manage, monitoring the end user experience of applications and network services becomes paramount. But that’s our marketing narrative. We wanted to actually back up this narrative with real data from the field so we turned to research firm Enterprise Marketing Associates (EMA).

EMA interviewed 100 IT managers in the US and UK who make purchasing decisions for application performance monitoring technologies to see what their painpoints were and how they were dealing with them. They published these results in a new white paper titled: “Taming IT Complexity with User Experience Monitoring.” The results were striking but not really surprising to us:

• Complexity was the No. 1 application support challenge
• This complexity is becoming increasingly expensive to support and is taxing on support resources
• More than 70% of respondents lack visibility to application performance
• 80% of respondents ranked user experience monitoring as critical or very important to business and IT outcomes
• Calls from users or helpdesk support tickets are the No. 1 way IT finds out about performance issues

The survey also showed that not just any user experience monitoring will do. To be effective, UEM needs to map to where users actually are, include testing and monitoring of distributed Internet infrastructure and services like DNS, CDNs and APIs, and offer reporting of service level agreement adherence.

We’ll be hosting a webinar with EMA research director Julie Craig, the report’s author, to go over the survey results in depth later this month. In the meantime, you can download and read the report at: