Levi Olmstead
3 Types of End-User Monitoring (+Benefits)
- Published: January 5, 2024
- Updated: March 1, 2024
Whether you’re a CIO at an enterprise, a manager-level executive at a mid-sized company, or just a product engineer for a software vendor, end-user behavior and UX is something you often think about, even if you don’t realize it.
And for good reason too: for instance, if your end-users are your customers, a broken UX increases the risk of customer churn; if they’re your employees or third-party partners, it’ll impact the speed and quality of their work.
That’s why end-user monitoring matters—it helps you keep tabs on how your end-users (whether they’re internal or external) are interacting with your software tools so you can fix any issues they’re facing and continuously improve their user experience.
This article will get into the core of end-user monitoring, explaining why it even matters, the different ways you can adopt it, and a handful of different EUM tools for different use cases.
What Is End-User Monitoring?
End-user monitoring refers to observing and analyzing the interactions and experiences of individual application end-users who are the ultimate consumers or users of an app, software, website, or system. Its primary goal is to understand and improve end-user behavior and experience by tracking various metrics, behaviors, and performance indicators.
Benefits of End-User Experience Monitoring
The single most important benefit of end-user experience monitoring is the ability to respond to contingencies quickly—whether it’s fixing an issue with your online store on Black Friday, simplifying your homepage, or creating a frictionless enterprise UX experience for digital processes in a CRM or HCM that enable employees.
At its core, end-user event monitoring empowers teams with invaluable insights into how your users behave, what they prefer, and the pain points they face, which makes it easier to chart a clear roadmap for optimizing digital platforms.
Here’s a list of the benefits end-user experience monitoring offers:
- Enhanced User Satisfaction: EUEM provides insights into how users engage with digital platforms, allowing businesses to address pain points, streamline processes, and optimize user experiences, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction.
- Improved Performance Optimization: By monitoring real-time user interactions, businesses can identify performance bottlenecks, optimize load times, and streamline processes to ensure smoother operations.
- Proactive Issue Identification: EUEM enables the early detection of issues or potential problems, allowing for proactive measures to address them before they impact a larger user base, minimizing disruptions.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: The insights generated from end-user experience monitoring are especially valuable for decision-making, guiding product development, feature enhancements, etc.
- Enhanced Business Agility: With a clear understanding of user behavior, businesses can swiftly adapt to changing trends, preferences, or market demands, staying agile and responsive in a competitive landscape.
- Optimization of IT Resources: EUEM helps efficiently allocate resources by identifying areas needing improvement or those performing well, optimizing IT investments for maximum impact.
- Support for Continuous Improvement: Continuous monitoring facilitates an iterative approach to improvement, enabling businesses to implement incremental changes based on real user data, fostering ongoing enhancement, and overcoming areas of user friction.
Types of End-User Experience Monitoring
While the general concept is the same, your approach to end-user monitoring will be slightly different, depending on whether it’s your customers, employees, or partner UX that you’re trying to track and improve. The audience you’re trying to monitor their usage determines your approach and the tools that’ll best suit your use case.
1. Application performance monitoring
Application performance monitoring (APM) refers to both the tactics and tools used to monitor and manage the performance and availability of software applications. It involves tracking various metrics related to an application’s performance, such as response times, resource usage, error rates, and overall user experience. APM aims to identify and resolve issues that could affect an application’s performance and ultimately impact user satisfaction.
APM tools collect data from different layers of an application’s infrastructure, including servers, databases, networks, and end-user devices. By analyzing this data, APM or observability solutions provide insights into the application’s behavior and performance bottlenecks. These insights help in proactively detecting and diagnosing issues, optimizing application performance, and ensuring that applications meet performance expectations.
Types of application performance issues you can monitor include:
- Outages
- Slow page load times
- Product bugs
Best APM tools for end-user monitoring
- Dynatrace: Dynatrace is a comprehensive observability platform for modern cloud environments. It offers real-time insights into the performance of complex applications, infrastructure, and user experiences. Dynatrace utilizes artificial intelligence and automation to continuously monitor and analyze the entire stack, from user interactions to underlying infrastructure components. It offers automatic discovery and mapping of application dependencies, allowing for a clear understanding of how different components interact.
- AppDynamics: AppDynamics offers end-to-end visibility into complex application environments, and allows users to track various metrics across different layers, including code-level insights, user experience, and infrastructure performance. AppDynamics uses a combination of real-time monitoring, automatic discovery, and correlation of performance data to provide a comprehensive view of an application’s health and behavior.
2. Business activity monitoring
Business activity monitoring (BAM) refers to the process of tracking key business processes in real-time to gain insights into the overall performance and health of an organization. It involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting data related to various business activities, which then empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions promptly.
BAM integrates data from multiple sources within an organization, such as enterprise applications, databases, sensors, and more, to provide a comprehensive view of ongoing activities. By monitoring these activities in real-time or near real-time, BAM helps detect bottlenecks and inefficiencies, which in turn allows companies to react swiftly, addressing issues before they escalate and optimizing processes for better performance and productivity.
Types of business activity analytics you can monitor include:
- Process governance
- Compliance monitoring
- Process completion rates
Best tools for business activity end-user monitoring
- Cflow: Cflow is a cloud-based workflow automation software designed to streamline, automate, and monitor business processes. The platform’s functionality is centered around a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG editor that makes it possible to create, manage, and optimize workflows without needing extensive technical expertise. Cflow also provides visibility into workflow progress, enabling teams to track and monitor the status of tasks, identify bottlenecks, and improve process efficiency over time.
- Oracle Business Activity Monitoring: Oracle BAM enables organizations to monitor and analyze critical business activities, and serves as a dashboard for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Oracle BAM collects data from various sources across the enterprise and presents it in customizable dashboards and reports, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly.
- Serverless360: Serverless360 is a comprehensive monitoring platform for managing complex serverless architectures within cloud environments like Microsoft Azure. It provides centralized monitoring, management, and automation capabilities for serverless applications. With Serverless360, users can visualize and control various components of serverless setups, including Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Grids, and Service Bus.
3. End-user behavior monitoring
End-user behavior monitoring focuses on observing users’ engagement patterns with your digital properties (i.e., websites, applications, etc.). The goal is to find trends in their behavior that suggest how you might improve user experience, eliminate friction from the customer journey and user flows, or any issues that might be flying under the radar.
To better isolate issues or data points, end-user monitoring typically combines multiple channels: for instance, let’s say you observe that 92% of the prospects on your homepage exit within <20 seconds. Regardless of your industry, acquisition channel, etc., that’s a high churn rate.
So, you might want to observe what users encounter when they navigate to that landing page by watching several session replays, conducting some funnel analysis (i.e., how many of the 8% that don’t churn continue to checkout?), observing the heatmaps for the homepage to see where interactions are clustered, etc.
Combining these channels will help you cancel false positives and suspicions to discover the problem. Maybe it could be that your homepage often goes blank after loading. In that case, you’ll need to fix that and test again.
In other words, monitoring end-user behavior helps you improve your product experience. It also helps you personalize your website or product to suit users’ expectations.
Types of end-user behavior variables or metrics you can monitor include:
- User experience journey mapping
- Identify user friction and areas of dropoff
- Build user segments and conduct cohort analysis
- Time-to-adoption and related product adoption metrics
Best tools for end-user behavior monitoring
- Whatfix: Whatfix offers detailed insights into user behavior across your website and applications. It collects and analyzes data related to user engagement, interactions, and adoption patterns within the application. By leveraging this feature, businesses gain a deep understanding of how users navigate through their software, which features are most used, and where users might encounter challenges or drop-offs. Companies can take action based on this data with Whatfix’s Visual Editor to create in-app guidance and contextual support to overcome areas of friction and improve overall user experience.
- Pendo: Pendo helps companies understand and improve how users interact with their digital products. It gives businesses a clear picture of how people use websites, apps, or software by tracking every click, swipe, and interaction. That data is then turned into valuable insights, showing where users spend their time, what features they love, and where they might get stuck or frustrated.
- Mixpanel: Mixpanel empowers product teams to gather detailed data on user actions, such as clicks, scrolls, and navigation paths, and offers insights into user engagement, feature usage, and conversion rates. What sets Mixpanel apart is its focus on event-based tracking, enabling companies to define and measure specific user actions that allow for in-depth analysis, user segmentation, and the ability to uncover patterns in user behavior.
Analyze End-User Experience, Overcome Friction Areas, and Enable End-Users With Whatfix’s Digital Adoption Platform & Analytics
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix guides users through applications, websites, and other technologies, helping end-users understand how specific features work, reduce friction areas, provide contextual guidance, and drive adoption. Whatfix acts a digital canvas layered over your product that annotates resources, offers help on-demand, and eliminates ambiguity with carefully crafted prompts, pointers, alerts, and snippets.
Whether you’re a startup, a mid-sized growth stage company, or an enterprise, Whatfix offers a product experience platform designed to help you:
- Analyze end-user behavior with Whatfix’s a product analytics suite that can narrow down to which pages users visit or engage with more often through event tracking.
- Maintain a library of self-help resources (think pre-recorded demos, videos, docs, wikis, etc.) that users can access on-demand, directly in your application, at the moment of need.
- Deploy in-app guided experiences that walk users through your product UX using a WYSIWYG editor.
- Engage end-users with contextual experiences and collect end-user feedback.
Looking to transform your end-user monitoring so you can better delight your users? Request a demo to learn more.
What Is Whatfix?
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance on any application that looks 100% native. With Whatfix, create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Understand how users are engaging with your applications with advanced product analytics.
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