Would you buy a full-blown fire brigade to put out a dumpster fire?

The same applies to Digital Experience Monitoring, if all you are looking for is a solution to put out a dumpster fire perhaps it’s better to hire a specialist who will have a look and help you put out the fire. But when Quality of Service means more to you than just a networking term, when it’s of strategic importance that the IT services you deliver is well received by your customers, when you want data to back up your strategic investments that’s when you start looking for Digital Experience Monitoring.

Don’t get me wrong, if it’s just a dumpster fire you can still reach out to me and I can help you with our solutions and knowledge but getting the true value out of any digital experience monitoring you need to see/want the bigger picture.

But what should a good Digital Experience Monitoring solution be? There are soo many vendors using the term nowadays that it almost feels like a hype. To me a proper Digital Experience Monitoring solution should follow these 3 simple rules:

1.     Hybrid, meaning it should be able to support multiple delivery environments across several different desktop OS’s. Sure, there’s an argument to be made for going for a DEM solution which was made by the same vendor as your delivery environment but unless you plan to stay with them till the end of time and they are the only vendor you have chosen isn’t it limiting you?

2.     Data sovereignty, by lack of a better word, meaning you, the customer, should be able to decide where the data that is collected is stored. Do you want/need this data to reside within your own data center or can it be moved to the cloud and if so under which conditions?

3.     Open, all data should be accessible in several different ways preferably by means of an API. Base reports and default dashboards are nice but although a lot of the customers I’ve talked to in the past 25-years do similar things none are carbon copies so having the possibility to extract whichever data you need for your specific environment is paramount.

But, be aware that when you decide to truly up the quality of your service, if you would rather invest in fire prevention than fire extinguishers you will need to invest in both software and people. Don’t fall for the shiny nice dashboards that tell you how you compare to your pears, those are nice to haves not need to haves, after all Mark Twain said it best: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

In order to achieve our strategic goals we need the right solution combined with the right skills.