Application Experience - Amplifying Observability for Today's Experiential World
Learnings from Global DEX Leaders
Nexthink’s industry-leading Experience 24 Events in Boston and London brought together over 1000 IT professionals dedicated to accelerating the value of strategic adoption of DEX. A hot topic was the growing recognition that traditional Observability solutions (APM’s and other high-cardinality technology monitoring solutions) while necessary, are insufficient to solve the full, end-to-end visibility of how employees are experiencing the totality of their web applications.
Today’s typical employee will likely access several dozen different applications throughout their workday, spanning traditional desktop applications, ever more hybrid applications, and a literal explosion in SaaS web applications – both commercial packaged and customizable “low code” extensible packaged as well as fully custom web applications.
Now entering its second decade, the explosive growth in web applications has driven increasing adoption of “Observability” solutions. Historically built on top of Application Performance Management (APM) tool technologies, these solutions were initially focused upon net-new, custom web applications, as businesses began and accelerated their digital transformations, implementing business process in software. B2C applications, built on cloud-first technologies formed the foundation upon which all such subsequent APM solutions were built.
Recently, APM solutions have been extended in multiple dimensions beyond focusing on “the performance of the code/backend” to include ever increasing telemetry from logs, the inclusion of ever more infrastructure telemetry (execution platforms and networks in particular), and more recently with the entre of Zscaler security metrics.
Observability is Necessary, but is it Sufficient?
There is no doubt that high cardinality APM/Observability tools and their extension to server and network technologies constitute an important and valuable part of the way modern enterprises manage their technology stack, and further digital transformation initiatives will only enhance that importance for critical, custom web applications.
Ever more granular instrumentation (e.g. Instana/IBM and their recently introduced one second data granularity), gives Application and infrastructure teams ever more visibility inside their application technology stacks, but, as with earlier less granular APM approaches, still comes with several limitations, especially when it comes to understanding Employee Experience using all applications. These gaps include:
- Only cover a subset of Application types
APM tools cannot handle all types of web applications, because code is injected in the application code/logic flow (on the backend), it can never be used for any packaged, commercial SaaS web applications for which no access to the code is possible. (e.g. HR, ERP, CRM, Call Center, Development Tools, etc.). There is also no coverage possible for any desktop-installed or hybrid applications such as Microsoft Office 365. - Cannot be used pervasively
High data granularity rates lead to extremely expensive cloud-hosted solutions due to massive data ingestion and processing requirements, driving up the price, and limiting use of such solutions to only the “most important of business critical applications”. - Incomplete experiential visibility
Mainly due to their origins (instrumenting server-side applications, not devices), today’s APM/Observability solutions mostly have no visibility whatsoever into critical elements of experience USING applications: Employee front-end devices (laptops, computers, browsers), as well as local networking. Recently, security solutions that have and deploy a client-side agent/data collector, have been extending to include ever more telemetry.
These gaps make clear the need for an over-arching approach that can fully contextualize all aspects of employee experience using all applications, not solely the performance of the custom web application itself and its infrastructure.
Taken together, these factors present a serious conundrum. At the same time as application observability is becoming an increasingly important priority for businesses, the current tools designed to provide it are only able to work on a partial basis – from the application code and its execution environment backwards – with no visibility to the actual employee experience.
What are we measuring?
Resolving this issue requires businesses to take a step back, pause, and reassess what they need to be measuring. Currently, observability is built on measuring the performance of applications and their supporting infrastructure, but outside application and infrastructure technical development and support teams this isn’t really the metric that is of most concern. Yes, this critical visibility enables them to drill into potential causes of issues that arise – whether detected by infrastructure monitoring, or in response to a issue escalation to their teams.
Measuring the performance of the application code and infrastructure is a poor proxy for understanding the total employee experience. While APMs will show statistics such as the detailed performance of application code/steps and intersections with infrastructure metrics like CPU usage or network error rates and throughput, these metrics at best offer a partial understanding of the real employee experience and – in that critical context – are grossly insufficient. Employees can have productivity sapping issues using applications that have nothing to do with any of the telemetry provided by such observability solutions.
What else is required?
By shifting the focus to include the quality of the user experience, organizations gain proactive insight into the most important element of any application, i.e. how productive it’s allowing an employee to be. After all, even if there may be problems on the backend, if these aren’t interfering with employees, then they are of secondary importance. This allows overstretched IT teams to more effectively prioritize their workload to ensure optimal productivity at all times.
Context is everything
Moving beyond application performance to total user experience has another key benefit. The way in which each user accesses a given application varies tremendously, depending on the version of the browser or operating system they have, the configuration they are using, or the quality of network connectivity. Application providers cannot hope to test against every conceivable set of conditions and so the onus is on companies to constantly measure and adapt.
In an environment where hundreds of (constantly updated) applications are being used in thousands of different combinations, the ability to have experiential details to easily prioritize the most pressing issues for any given subsets of users is invaluable to IT teams – from EUC and Desktop teams all the way to application and infrastructure teams. Constant proactive monitoring of employee experiences using applications gives early warnings – and context – to infrastructure and application teams on areas to focus and address – long before any technical alerts are raised from their observability tooling.
At Nexthink Experience 2024, Cox Enterprises presented how they extended their observability solutions beyond APM tools capabilities, including multiple dimensions beyond simple performance (They covered three synergistic use cases they named "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly") highlighting the additional value and visibility beyond traditional APM/Observability tools - “… ask your APM tool to provide that kind of insight”).
It's about the complete Digital Employee Experience
Therefore, businesses need to properly equip their IT teams with the ability to consolidate experiential visibility over all applications in a single space and proactively manage any application according to total experience (not just performance) as well as drilling down to see which users are having issues and what the common factors might be to focus and speed remediation.
Following Nexthink’s recognition as a leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools, Nexthink was also ranked 1st in all 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities use cases including Application Experience.
Conclusion: Add Application Experience to complete Observability
Application performance and reliability is clearly essential to almost all digital experiences. However, as important as this is, value can be significantly amplified with the addition of experiential monitoring and management to add proactivity and full context.
The combination of APM and infrastructure observability tools and DEX offers the ability to simultaneously unlock employee productivity and increase the efficiency, scope and reach of all IT teams, from workplace and desktop teams to application and infrastructure teams.
So, while application performance is vital to a good user experience, it is the total experience that businesses should really be looking to measure. It’s a simple addition, but one that can fundamentally change the entire way that organizations understand observability for the better.
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### Disclaimers and attributions
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools, Dan Wilson, et al, 26 August 2024.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
