Mobile teams struggle to solve what they can’t see

For many businesses, mobile is now the most critical channel for engaging users. Mobile apps are where purchases happen, accounts are created, and first impressions are made. But it’s also where users are most likely to abandon their journeys if something feels broken, slow, or unintuitive.

All practitioners struggle to understand what actually happened during a user’s session when something goes wrong or when a user behaves in a way that deviates from the expected journey. This can get particularly puzzling when there are no apparent errors or performance blockers hindering a user’s experience. Traditional tools provide fragmentary details: logs, events, crash reports, or aggregated analytics. However, none of these capture the full context. Mobile engineers are unable to reliably reproduce bugs without seeing exact user actions. Support teams can’t respond effectively to vague or incomplete user reports.

Full visibility into mobile user behavior

This is where Session Replay comes in. This capability recreates real user behavior in a video-like playback, so you can visually step through a session just as the user experienced it: taps, swipes, scrolls, page transitions, and all. And now, for the first time, this powerful capability extends beyond the browser and crashes on mobile apps to include full sessions for native mobile apps.

With Dynatrace Session Replay for mobile apps, teams get a complete, contextual view of how users interact with mobile apps in the wild by collecting and visualizing key signals like gestures, views, UI states, and navigation paths. While Session Replay is often seen as a frontend-focused tool, it can significantly help identify, triage, and resolve backend issues by connecting user actions to system behavior. This helps contextualize backend failures, correlate user actions to backend events, and, in a nutshell, identify misalignment between front and backends.

How to make the most of Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps

Let’s dive into key use cases where Session Replay delivers tangible value across teams:

Faster debugging

Understanding the problem is often impossible with only data from Logs or Real User Monitoring. In some cases, observing the sessions where the error occurs can provide valuable context and lead to a more accurate solution.

Use case: Imagine your team can’t reproduce a performance issue affecting only a small segment of users still using iOS 17. Logs are inconclusive, and RUM data doesn’t tell the whole story.

With Session Replay, you can:

• Watch the exact gestures and actions related to the issue.
• See which page or interaction triggered the problem.
• Identify whether it’s a device-specific issue, a network hiccup, or a UI bug.

Result: Your dev team fixes the issue in hours, not days, without needing to reproduce it manually.

UX optimization and boosting conversion

The best way to understand users is to observe how they engage with your applications. Session Replay allows you to select a sample of mobile sessions based on various criteria. Watching these sessions helps you learn about annoyances and understand patterns in user behavior, which can then be streamlined into a better user experience.

Use case: Your analytics show a drop-off in the final step of your checkout funnel, and you don’t know why. Is it a confusing UI? A broken button? A slow-loading view?

With Session Replay, you can:

• Watch real user sessions to see where they pause, scroll, or back out.
• Identify if users struggle with form validation, payment options, or navigation.
• Spot rage taps or repeated attempts to interact with unresponsive elements.

Result: You optimize the checkout flow, reduce abandonment, and increase conversions—backed by real user behavior.

Improved customer support

Allowing help desk personnel to review the session that prompted a user’s complaint provides common ground for the conversation and helps ensure user satisfaction.

Use case: A user submits a support ticket: “The app didn’t work when I tried to book a ride.” No screenshots, no steps to reproduce, and the issue can’t be replicated.

With Session Replay, your support team can:

• Instantly view the user’s session to see what they saw.
• Understand the context: which screen they were on, what they tapped, and what went wrong.
• Provide a fast, accurate response, or escalate with full context to engineering.

Result: Faster resolution, happier users, and fewer back-and-forth emails.

Data privacy

Dynatrace adheres to world-class standards for data protection. Mobile session data is secured just like any other captured telemetry. However, privacy configurations must still be reviewed by each customer to ensure compliance with internal and legal requirements. Like web applications, Session Replay for mobile applications offers three levels of privacy controls:

• Safest – Masks all editable text fields, labels, images, switches, and web views
• Safe – Masks all editable text fields only
• Custom – By default, behaves like Safest, but allows you to define exactly which elements or views to mask.

See configure custom masking in the preferred documentation below.

Turn on Dynatrace Session Replay for Mobile Apps

Cluster-side activation

Session Replay is now supported for both iOS (including those built in SwiftUI) and Android apps (including those using Jetpack Compose). To get started, you’ll first need to turn it on for each mobile app, as it’s managed separately at the cluster level.

To activate the feature:

1. Navigate to: Frontends → Select a mobile application → Edit → Enablement and cost control
2. Set the Session Replay Mobile toggle to on.

Once turned on, you can define the percentage of sessions to capture. By default, Dynatrace captures 100% of sessions, but you can reduce this based on your data volume and storage needs.

Session Replay for Mobile integrates seamlessly with Session Replay for Crashes. This allows you to:

• Automatically capture 100% of crash sessions
• Sample a configurable percentage of all other sessions

If you’re hosting Dynatrace on-premises, make sure to prepare for increased storage requirements before enabling this feature.

Instrumentation and configuration of a mobile application

Scenarios differ depending on the operating system, so please follow our documentation:

• Configure Session Replay for iOS
• Configure Session Replay for Android

The instrumentation and configuration process is simplified for customers who have already used Session Replay for Crashes or mobile Real User Monitoring.

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Business Insights is a unique team within Dynatrace that partners with organizations to maximize their value from Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Business Analytics, through our deep product expertise and exclusive technology capabilities. The Business Insights team provides product configuration and best practices, exclusive analytics and analysis to drive improved customer experience, and expertise on demand. Dedicating the necessary time, resources, and focus to deliver excellent end-user experiences can be a challenge. This is why Dynatrace’s largest and most sophisticated customers rely on Business Insights to deliver the strategic value that helps drive improved customer experience and business outcomes, whether that’s:

• Deploying a synthetic monitoring strategy to help a large beverage company achieve 100% age-verification compliance for the first time across 3,000+ properties
• Using our deep expertise in real user analysis to help a global automaker drive a 90% reduction in frontend errors, a 50% reduction in search results load time, and a 58% year-over-year reduction in outages
• Identifying the root cause of a performance issue impacting customers on one of the UK’s largest retail sites, which, when fixed, reduced exit rate by 2%, driving $500k+ of additional monthly revenue
• Working with senior executives and cross-functional teams at one of the world’s largest airlines to implement a holistic Business Observability strategy combining DEM, Business Analytics, and the broader Dynatrace platform to provide an end-to-end view of how infrastructure, services, and front-end applications impact critical business flows and KPIs in real time

Business Insights has long worked closely with Dynatrace customers to help accelerate adoption and value from the Dynatrace Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Business Analytics capabilities; however, customer collaboration could be challenging at times with information scattered across emails and PowerPoint slides, multiple channels of engagement, and analysis disconnected from the Dynatrace platform. The Business Insights app simplifies and enhances the experience and engagement of Business Insights services, making it more seamless and accessible. It’s also the starting point for delivering more advanced AI-driven analysis, like those pioneered in the Opportunity Insights app.

Dynatrace delivers more value than its competitors

The Business Insights app directly addresses these pain points through unified, contextual delivery on the Dynatrace platform that transforms how insights are received, consumed, engaged with, and acted upon.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Bringing Business Insights into an app on the Dynatrace platform creates an enhanced experience of both the service and the platform through targeted, actionable analysis and recommendations directly in Dynatrace, in the context of the rest of the product, and with the ability to move seamlessly between them.

Timeline view: Your complete analysis history

As a Business Insights customer, keeping track of communications (enablement content, historical analysis, value over time, etc.), bringing new team members up to speed on the service, and summarizing value received over time for key stakeholders could be a challenge, with everything buried in emails. The Business Insights app centralizes all engagement and analysis in a single timeline view, making it easy to review everything the Business Insights team has provided for your organization, including:

• Analysis value moments
• Announcements
• Enablement material

Invites to live sessions such as Tech Talks and Customer Connects.

Each analysis value moment is tagged with helpful metadata, including type (performance, operational, business), product component (web, mobile, synthetic), application/synthetic monitor name, and specific page or event details. Enablement moments help you ramp up on the product more quickly, while announcements make sure you’re always up to date with what’s happening with the DEM and Business Analytics capabilities in the context of what matters to you. This comprehensive view helps new team members quickly understand your digital experience landscape and previous insights, accelerating onboarding for the service and Dynatrace DEM.

Value moment detail: Rich interactive content

Value moments are small and consumable DEM insights and analysis deliverables put together by our analysts for operational, performance, and business use cases to help you understand where to focus. Selecting a value moment from the timeline opens the main view with structured, easy-to-navigate content. Each value moment includes an optional video summary at the top for a quick overview, followed by indexed sections that allow you to jump directly to relevant information. Content links seamlessly to other Dynatrace Apps, Notebooks, and Dashboards for deeper context, eliminating the need to switch between tools. Each value moment also includes a shareable deep link, making bringing additional team members into the conversation simple. The structured, consumable content of value moments and easily navigable content help teams quickly identify focus areas and collaborate on operational decisions and actions.

Collaborative engagement and real-time feedback

The Business Insights app transforms analysis from a one-way delivery into a collaborative experience. Simply select any content within a value moment to leave comments or questions directed to the Business Insights team or your team members. Our team receives immediate notification and responds directly in the comment thread, keeping everyone aligned and in context. You’ll also receive email notifications with direct links when we reply. Threaded discussions and immediate notifications keep teams aligned and engaged with the Business Insights team.

Each value moment also includes a dedicated feedback section, allowing you to quickly indicate value and direct our future analysis and priorities.

Early feedback

The ability to easily provide feedback has been pivotal in quickly refining our interactions with the Insights team and the value we get from the service
– North American gaming company

By centralizing everything in one place, we’re inspiring people to use RUM and freeing them from digging through multiple tools and endless emails to find the context they need.
– UK insurance company

What’s next

The Dynatrace Business Insights app has been built to transform the way you engage with Business Insights and increase the value you receive from the Dynatrace platform, giving you:

• Centralized communication – All analysis, discussions, reports, and material in one searchable location
• Contextual engagement – See analysis in context of your real-time data within the product, with direct links to other apps/notebooks/dashboards
• Increased adoption and team exposure – Easy sharing of value moments with deep links, making insights more accessible across your organization
• Simplified collaboration – Comment directly on specific content to seamless interaction with Business Insights and your internal teams
• Historical access – Timeline view for easy tracking of past interactions, discussions, and analysis
• Self-service access – Anytime access to reports and insights without waiting for emails and calls
• Enhanced service through direct feedback – Simple, built-in mechanisms indicate value and guide future analysis

This first release is just the beginning, not merely a new interface but the foundation for next-generation Business Insights that will allow advanced machine learning and AI capabilities for enhanced analysis.

Get started

The new app is now generally available for Dynatrace Business Insights customers running a Dynatrace SaaS deployment. We’ll progressively roll the app out to existing customers over the coming weeks:

• If you’re interested in being part of the initial wave of adopters, please talk with your Dynatrace analyst or submit this form.
• If you’re not a Business Insights customer and are interested in learning more, please reach out to the Dynatrace Sales team.

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Dynatrace and the Dynatrace logo, are trademarks of the Dynatrace, Inc. group of companies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

The post The Power of Business Insights expertise now directly on the Dynatrace platform appeared first on Dynatrace news.

When I founded Dynatrace, I aimed to bridge the gap between IT performance and user experience. My goal was to provide IT teams with insights to optimize customer experience by collaborating with business teams, using both business KPIs and IT metrics.

To accomplish this, we traced all digital interactions from device to backend for detailed insights into personalization impacts. Using causal AI, we identified and resolved performance issues automatically. Recently, we’ve expanded our digital experience monitoring to cover the entire customer journey, from conversion to fulfillment.

Shifting to customer-centric IT  

For observability data to be meaningful, it must connect the performance of IT systems to customer experience throughout their journey, across both digital and physical touchpoints. Only then can executives understand whether their software helps to deliver the intended business outcomes.

Dynatrace has been built from the ground up to observe, analyze, and protect customer interactions end-to-end by unifying observability, security, and business data in context. This combination boosts your analytics abilities while also saving costs by consolidating observability, real-time user behavior, and session replay tools within a single platform.

Dynatrace helps executives take the same proactive approach to customer experiences by addressing the following five critical needs:

1. Understand the customer’s business process, including identification of pain points and automation opportunities.
2. Identify where the customer journey can be optimized to improve retention rates.
3. Find ways to boost satisfaction, increase conversions, and accelerate business growth.
4. Automate root-cause and customer impact analysis.
5. Accelerate complaint resolution and establish preventive measures and controls.

Avoid the cost of customer churn by optimizing customer experience

85% of unhappy customers would make the extra effort to go to a company that has better customer service. In 2024, acquiring a new customer costs five to 10 times more than retaining an existing one. Specifically, it can be up to seven times more expensive to attract a new customer compared to keeping one. Additionally, existing customers tend to spend 67% more on average than new customers.

This data speaks to the importance of investing in digital experience and loyalty, which many executives do. However, not many realize the efficiencies they can gain when data from all customer experience processes – observability, customer behavior, and business data – is in a single place, as it is with the Dynatrace Grail data lakehouse. Real-time customer experience remediation identifies and informs the organization about any issues and prevents them in the experience process sooner.

Achieve unparalleled agility and customer satisfaction

As today’s customer experiences span direct access (through web, mobile, and IoT) and indirect access (through APIs, messaging, logistics, and other forms of interactions), customer journeys are omnichannel. This shift highlights the value of observability for a complete and holistic understanding of user journeys. The steps across devices, APIs, server-side service invocations, and information from the inner workings of services can be used to gain a complete understanding of omnichannel user journeys and their associated customer satisfaction and business success.

Dynatrace unifies data from digital and physical touchpoints in a single platform and creates an end-to-end view into the following:

• The performance, reliability, and user experience supported by applications.
• The security, privacy, and regulatory compliance standards of digital services.
• The end-to-end experience for every customer throughout the entire process.

With these insights, you can act on improving the reliability, performance, and user experience of your entire customer journey. This can include live interactions as well as asynchronous interactions across all service touchpoints, whether that’s an order being shipped or a suitcase arriving at the same airport as its owner.

The Dynatrace platform’s granular insights also empower development teams to innovate more effectively so they can deliver faster change, helping executives improve customer experience.

Dynatrace’s advanced digital experience management capabilities, including Session Replay, provide unparalleled visibility into the customer journey. Our customers frequently run team meetings to visually review customer sessions to better understand issues with experiences. Typically, without session replay, if a customer experiences a problem, the IT team logs into an admin account or looks for errors in logs, but often doesn’t find anything wrong. With Session Replay, they can directly replicate what the customer saw and identify the exact problem they are describing. That result can be automatically documented and passed to the development team, providing them with full context of the problem. Session replay sessions are anonymous, having implemented highest standards in the market for privacy management.

User experiences go into many dimensions: business events, dashboards, session replay, synthetic checks which help with performance, reliability, and experience of digital interactions.

A proactive approach to analytics

One of several reasons to observe real user behavior instead of running synthetic tests is that modern applications serve different and individualized content. Personalization, user profiles, pertinent customizations, user permissions, and so forth make almost every web or mobile page unique in their behavior and how they access the backends. Hence, only deep, end-to-end insights can provide the actionable information required to improve experiences and complement common marketing-related analytics tools (e.g. Google or Adobe Analytics).

Analyzing real user behavior with end-to-end context provides value to many use cases, including the following:

• React to issues faster, automate, and quantify the customer impact with the help of Dynatrace AI.
• Optimize business outcomes (revenue/business goals vs. cloud cost and R&D effort) towards inflection points of business goal vs. experience through unified technical, experience, and business data analytics in a single space.
• Improve software delivery by observing customer success on a subset of customers first before going broad (for example, progressive delivery, dark launches, and A/B testing) with Dynatrace support for feature flags and software delivery observability.
• Eliminate finger-pointing as end-to-end visibility connects the data points across departmental needs. Finally, as an executive, you have the means to quickly identify the right team to fix and improve.
• Prioritize investments in new features vs. improvements by better understanding actual customer experiences, utilization, satisfaction, sentiment, and errors. For example, if you have too many rage clicks, you likely want to spend the next sprint on experience improvements vs. new features.
• Automate smarter using actual customer experience metrics, not just server-side data.

All of these use cases go beyond commonly used analytics tools. Dynatrace collects information from the front-end and APIs, backend, and the inner workings of services in full context.

Finally, I hear from executives that while they can leverage Dynatrace to get the best out of their data, they sometimes need additional expertise so that their teams know where to focus and what to act on. This expertise can often come in the form of a Dynatrace partner and our Business Insight team (or both). The Dynatrace Business Insights team are global experts who can help executives get to the platform’s value faster. And by leveraging precise data modeling, the Business Insights team can help executives understand how to strike the balance between optimization of customer experience and investing in new features.

The post Breakthrough insights into customer experiences with Dynatrace to accelerate business growth appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Performance and error optimization is complicated, and the approach to driving improvement has long relied on static recommendations disconnected from a site’s end users and their experiences. While traditional methods can help you understand when your users face poor performance or errors, understanding if and how much these problems impact your business remains largely guesswork. The new Opportunity Insights app (available to subscribers of the Dynatrace Business Insights service) takes an industry-first approach to shift this paradigm: using predictive AI on top of your application’s historical real user data, we identify the primary performance/error metric impacting user experience on each page and quantify the predicted business impact of recommended optimizations. With this information, business and application owners are empowered to make decisions based on their impact on the bottom line.

Performance, errors, and user experience

Dynatrace has long understood the importance of performance as a foundational component of user experience and the impact that page speed and any friction introduced by errors have on user behavior. When a page is slow to load, users are quick to abandon the site; research by Google, Vodafone, and others has repeatedly shown that even small (~100 ms) degradations in page performance can increase abandonment, lost revenue, and lead to persistent changes in user behavior. Additionally, JavaScript or HTTP errors that impact a page’s functionality or overall experience can be even more immediate and lasting, leaving users with the impression that a site’s problems reflect the brand, leading to a longer-lasting negative impression.

Despite this broad, conceptual understanding of the importance and impact of poor performance and errors on end users, it’s difficult for site owners to fully understand and quantify the experience of their unique site on its users. Until now, the best approach was to take generic, static recommendations based on the experience of large internet brands and their user bases, apply them to a site, and hope to see improvement in the business. Sometimes, these recommendations are so far from current performance or cost so much to implement that they seem irrelevant or unattainable. The addition of more and more metrics over time has only made this increasingly complex. As a result, it’s challenging to get business and resources focused on performance and error optimization without supporting data that shows how those optimizations will impact your organization’s financial outcomes.

Site owners and businesses are left asking where they should invest and what exactly they should optimize to balance the best experience for their users with the least amount of effort that will lead to improvements in the business.

Performance and errors in context

What if you could answer the question, “What is the smallest change I can make to this page to maximally reduce user-exit rates and improve conversion rates?”

With Opportunity Insights, Dynatrace uses predictive AI and your site’s real user data to identify opportunities where improvements in performance and errors can make the most significant difference in retaining users and sessions while reducing exit rates and converting more customers.

To provide precise, contextual recommendations for performance and error improvement on a given page, Opportunity Insights does two key things:

• First, it looks at user behavior and performance/error metrics across millions of sessions and identifies which candidate metrics show the most significant impact on user experience and should be considered a metric to improve. Performance metrics to improve can be Visually Complete, Speed Index, or other timing metrics associated with the page load cycle.
• Opportunity Insights then predicts the business impact of improvement in those metrics and suggests a target for the most significant return on effort,” expressed as an increase in retained sessions, conversion percentage, or revenue per month.

From an underlying list of hundreds of opportunities, Opportunity Insights surfaces the Top 3 opportunities that will provide you with the most significant return on effort.

How we do it

Opportunity Insights’ predictive AI is powered by a patent-pending structural causal machine learning model (connecting the cause and effect of performance, errors, and behavior) that is trained on each application’s unique real user session data across millions of sessions to analyze errors, performance metrics, and behavior patterns. It looks at these metrics across key pages to pinpoint where your users are most impacted and which metric directly impacts each page.

With this deep understanding of the intersection of performance, errors, and real user behavior, Opportunity Insights simulates over 650 million possible scenarios of performance improvement per application to surface precise recommendations for optimization that will yield the most significant increase in retained sessions for the least amount of effort. Armed with this prediction, it’s easy to understand the potential payoff of improvements and better prioritize your development efforts.

In evaluating our model’s accuracy in understanding performance/errors and behavior, we use historical real user data and a standard 80-20 train-test split to train our model. It predicts user behavior based on performance/error experience. We’ve tested it across various applications and industries, and it accurately predicts user behavior about 90% of the time. When the suggested metric is optimized, the user-exit rate drops, and the number of additional retained sessions increases as predicted.

We also tested our business impact prediction in real-world scenarios. We used customer applications where our model identified improvement opportunities. After implementing the suggested optimizations, we found that ~20% more users and sessions were retained than predicted, showing that our model’s predictions are conservative.

Early user feedback

Preliminary user feedback validates the ability of the app to help application teams, and owners quickly and easily understand where to optimize and the business impact of optimizations. Here are a few customer highlights:

• The director of e-commerce at a leading budget airline stated, “This is exactly what we need [in our decision-making], connecting application performance and business outcomes.”
• The IT Manager of a leading US insurance company stated, “This aligns with the direction we are taking the company, which is to make decisions based on business impact.”
• A platform monitoring manager from a leading payment company stated, “Honestly, this should be driving where they (the teams) are doing bug fixes and performance improvements.”

Get started

Opportunity Insights is available with the Dynatrace Business Insights service. It was released to a subset of Business Insights customers as a preview in April 2024 and is now generally available with Dynatrace version 1.296.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about the technology underlying Opportunity Insights and how you can quickly understand where to strategically invest development resources so they have the greatest impact on your business.

If you’re already a Business Insights customer and want to learn more, please contact your Insights Team. If you’re not a Business Insights customer but are interested in Opportunity Insights and the value Dynatrace Business Insights can bring your customers and your business, please contact your Dynatrace Account Executive or Customer Success Manager.

The post Dynatrace Opportunity Insights uses AI prediction and real-user data to optimize business outcomes appeared first on Dynatrace news.

To give your customers a top-quality digital experience, it’s important to make sure your applications are always working properly. Synthetic monitoring, also known as synthetic testing, can help to confirm your applications are performing as intended, and if they’re not, help you quickly figure out what’s going on. Although synthetic monitoring tools have become a crucial part of application performance monitoring, not all solutions cover all types or yield the best results.

As modern cloud architectures are evolving, so too are the ways users can interact with your applications. We’ll get into how the different types of monitoring work, but first, some background.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is an application performance monitoring practice that emulates the paths users might take when engaging with an application. It uses scripts to generate simulated user behavior for different scenarios, geographic locations, device types, and other variables.

After collecting and analyzing this valuable performance data, a synthetic monitoring solution can:

• Give you crucial insight into how well your application is performing
• Automatically keep tabs on application uptime and tell you how your application responds to typical user behavior
• Zero in on specific business transactions — for example, by alerting you to issues users might experience while attempting to complete a purchase or fill out a web form

How does synthetic monitoring work?

In synthetic monitoring, a robot client application that has been installed on a browser, device, or computer transmits a series of automated transactions to your application. These server calls and testing scripts simulate an end user’s clickstream as they navigate through key areas of your application. Typically, they run every 15 minutes, but you can configure them for different frequencies or to run immediately based on a specific action.

Once the robot client receives a response from your application, it reports the results back to the synthetic monitoring system. If the client detects an error during one of its regularly scheduled synthetic tests, the monitoring system will ask it to run that test again. If the follow-up test also results in an error, then the monitoring system will consider the error confirmed and escalate it within the organization as appropriate.

Teams can configure synthetic monitoring tools in various ways according to a company’s requirements. For example, you can set up a robot client on a machine that’s located behind your firewall to confirm that the internal environment is running as you expected, or you can deploy a robot client to a computer outside the firewall to get a sense of how well an application is performing. If you want a more comprehensive view of application availability and performance, you can configure several robot clients on browsers in multiple locations.

Synthetic monitoring vs. real user monitoring

Synthetic monitoring is often compared with another application performance technique known as real user monitoring (RUM). As the name suggests, RUM tracks actions taken by actual users instead of emulating them. Organizations often implement RUM by injecting JavaScript code into a webpage and then collecting performance data in the background as actual users interact with that page.

So, what is synthetic monitoring typically used for, and when might a business decide to use RUM instead? Synthetic monitoring is often helpful to identify short-term performance issues that may impact the user experience while an application is still under development. Early detection helps businesses nip potential performance issues in the bud. This approach is handy for regression testing and production site monitoring, for example. Real user monitoring, by contrast, can help a business understand long-term trends in an application’s performance after it has been deployed.

Why use synthetic monitoring?

If your application doesn’t perform well when your customers try to use it, they will quickly leave in pursuit of a better customer experience. This could play out in a variety of ways. For example:

• High bounce rates. Your website might take too long to load, resulting in a high bounce rate. Or, you might be lagging behind your competitors when it comes to application performance without even knowing it. This will hurt your ability to acquire new customers and grow your market share.
• Difficulty troubleshooting. Even when your organization is aware something is amiss with an application, it may not know where to begin troubleshooting. When it comes to application performance, IT teams can’t always get to the bottom of what’s going on quickly — especially when they’re overextended and juggling several priorities. And while your people are in the dark and searching for answers, your organization could feel an immediate and significant impact on its bottom line.

Emulating user behavior paths in a test environment helps you avoid these issues so you can:

• Monitor system health. Synthetic monitoring can tell you if your website is available, how fast it’s running, if key transactions are functioning as expected, and where a potential slowdown or failure might lie.
• Improve performance. Over time, synthetic monitoring can give you performance benchmarks, highlighting areas for improvement and optimization.
• Prevent issues early. You can also use synthetic monitoring to find and fix potential errors before they affect your users, raising the bar on the user experience. This is particularly useful in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environments.
• Increase resiliency. Synthetic monitoring can also help you prepare for peak traffic periods or anticipate performance requirements in a new region or market.

Synthetic monitoring tools are also useful for making sure you’re honoring service level agreements (SLAs) with your end-users. If an issue comes up involving third-party providers, you will be better equipped to hold them accountable, as well.

Types of synthetic monitoring

Synthetic monitoring usually includes three types: availability monitoring, web performance monitoring, and transaction monitoring.

• Availability monitoring enables an organization to confirm that a site or application is available and responding to requests. Availability monitoring can also use a more granular approach — for example, by checking to make sure specific content is available or that a specific type of API call is successful.
• Web performance monitoring typically looks at specific web metrics such as page load speed and the performance of specific elements on a webpage. It checks web content, errors, and sluggish response times.
• Transaction monitoring attempts to complete specific transactions such as logging in, completing a form, and checkout.

Within the realm of synthetic monitoring, there are also two main categories of synthetic tests:

• Browser tests – a robot client simulates a transaction a user might attempt (such as making a purchase)
• API tests – an organization monitors specific endpoints across each layer of the network and application infrastructure

Within API tests, there are different types of tests, including HTTP, SSL, and DNS. For example, API tests often use HTTP tests to monitor application uptime and responsiveness. Meanwhile, SSL tests confirm if users can securely complete transactions on a site using valid SSL certificates, and DNS tests make sure the site’s DNS resolution and lookup times are within expected parameters. A company might use multiple API tests to monitor whether a specific workflow is working properly from end to end — this type of API monitoring is called a multistep API test.

Challenges of synthetic monitoring

Modern applications are inherently complex. Because users access them from a variety of locations and contexts, synthetic monitoring is often not comprehensive enough to account for all the potential errors or situations that might arise. DevOps teams are accounting for this problem by placing a higher priority on introducing application testing earlier in the software development life cycle. However, synthetic monitoring is still often difficult to properly set up without specialized technical knowledge, and it is time-consuming even for the team members that have the required skill set.

Synthetic tests aren’t very resilient, and they can easily fail when small UI changes are introduced, generating unnecessary alert noise. This means that whenever a minor application element such as a button is changed, the corresponding test must be, too. And lastly, many synthetic monitoring tools lack the context needed to explain why a specific failure happened or what the business implications might be, lengthening time to resolution and making it unnecessarily difficult to prioritize application performance issues.

Benefits of synthetic monitoring

Proactive Monitoring: Synthetic monitoring allows you to proactively spot performance issues and availability problems. By imitating user interactions, it identifies irregularities before they impact real users. This early detection helps prevent potential outages and ensures a smoother user experience.

Global Testing: You can assess your application’s performance in various locations. Synthetic tests run from multiple regions, providing insights into regional variations in performance.

Browser and Device-Specific Testing: Synthetic monitoring lets you evaluate your application’s behavior across different browsers and devices. This helps identify compatibility issues and ensures consistent performance for all users.

Works Inside and Outside the Firewall: Unlike Real User Monitoring (RUM), which relies on actual users, synthetic monitoring can be completely automated and run inside and outside your organization’s network. This flexibility ensures comprehensive coverage.

Automated with Regular Frequency: Synthetic monitoring can run at regular intervals, such as every minute or hour, 24/7. This continuous monitoring ensures timely detection of any performance degradation.

Synthetic monitoring tools

A good synthetic monitoring solution should give your organization complete, 24/7 visibility into your applications. To accomplish this, it should include the following kinds of synthetic monitors:

• Single-URL browser monitors. A single-URL browser monitor simulates the experience a user would have while visiting your application using an up-to-date web browser. When run frequently from public and private locations, a browser monitor can alert you when your application becomes inaccessible or when baseline performance degrades significantly.
• Browser click paths. Browser click paths also simulate a user’s visit, but they monitor specific workflows in your application. An advanced synthetic monitoring solution can let you record the exact sequence of clicks and user actions you want to monitor, then set the browser click path to automatically run at regular intervals.
• HTTP monitors. HTTP monitors are useful for monitoring whether specific API endpoints are available, and they can also perform straightforward HTTP checks to confirm single-resource availability. HTTP monitoring tools should allow you to set up performance thresholds for HTTP monitors, too.

Synthetic monitoring use cases

Financial Services

Online Banking Systems: Synthetic monitoring ensures that online banking platforms remain available and responsive for users.

Payment Gateways: Monitoring payment gateways helps prevent transaction failures and delays.

Trading Platforms: Synthetic tests verify the performance of trading systems, which are critical for financial institutions.

Healthcare Technology

Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems: Synthetic monitoring ensures EHR systems are accessible and responsive for healthcare professionals.

Patient Portals: Monitoring patient portals helps maintain seamless communication between patients and healthcare providers.

Telehealth Platforms: Synthetic tests validate the reliability of telehealth services, especially during high-demand periods.

General Web Applications

Availability Testing: Proactively detect failures even when there is no user traffic (for example, off business hours).

API Endpoints: Monitor the availability and performance of third-party API endpoints.

How Dynatrace can power your synthetic monitoring

If you’re thinking about better understanding how your applications are performing, you might be wondering what synthetic monitoring tools you need to get started. You’ll want to pick a solution that simulates business-critical journeys through your most important applications across your mobile and web channels. This can give you immediate answers to questions about application availability and the impact it’s having on the user experience. Your synthetic monitoring solution should also be able to help you quickly identify the root cause of any application performance issue so you can resolve it as soon as possible.

Dynatrace Synthetic Monitoring provides all the information you need to know the moment an application’s performance falters. By using all major desktop and mobile browsers to simulate user activity, Dynatrace helps ensure that web, mobile, cloud, and streaming transactions go smoothly for customers around the globe.

This is key for evaluating whether applications meet your SLA requirements, and it can determine whether business outcomes have been impacted. It can also eliminate troubleshooting through AI-driven automation, as well as rank problems in order of importance to the business — significantly reducing the time required for your IT team to identify and address root causes.

To catch those longer-term trends, Dynatrace RUM uniquely captures the full visibility of the customer experience to eliminate user experience blind spots, and Session Replay provides indisputable video evidence of the complete digital experience, so business, development and operations stakeholders can collaborate and agree where to make improvements.

These advanced digital experience monitoring capabilities help you proactively identify and address application performance issues from anywhere in the world. With the right synthetic monitoring solutions in place, your business can go a long way toward ensuring a consistent, satisfying customer experience.

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Companies face mounting pressure to digitally transform and deliver seamless cross-channel experiences. These experiences are critical not only for attracting new prospects and driving satisfaction but also for providing more value to customers and enabling business growth. Adobe Experience Manager empowers businesses to optimize and deliver engaging experiences across websites, mobile apps, and other touchpoints. As part of delivering a compelling experience, it is vital that companies develop a deeper understanding of their customers. As a result, user experiences can be optimized, and issues can be proactively addressed before customers become frustrated with errors or broken journeys.

End-to-end observability across every tier powering your digital experiences using RUM

Application owners and SREs often struggle to get a complete picture of the customer journey and are unable to pinpoint issues due to a lack of comprehensive visibility. As a result, it is difficult to ensure application efficiency and ensure accurate delivery across touchpoints. This lack of end-to-end visibility leads to blind spots that impact customer satisfaction.

The Dynatrace platform offers comprehensive observability and monitoring across the entire technology stack. By going beyond application performance monitoring with AI-powered, full stack observability, Dynatrace enables seamless end-to-end visibility. Furthermore, by integrating with Adobe Experience Manager, you get quick visibility, ensuring application efficiency across all channels and the ability to scale in support of even the largest Adobe Experience Manager instances.

Dynatrace automatically detects all Adobe Experience Manager applications and visualizes their dependencies—from the website, to the container, to the cloud service. This enables you to enrich your Adobe analytics data with end-to-end traces across all tiers and to get precise, real-time user insights. You can monitor Adobe Experience Manager instances intelligently and provide personalized, content-driven experiences without gaps or blind spots.

By relying on Dynatrace® Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) integrated with Adobe Experience Manager—specifically Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, and Session Replay—you gain real-time insight into the user experience of their sites and applications. This capability extends across devices and geographies and includes critical front-end monitoring use cases like performance and availability monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause analysis, complaint resolution, and understanding user behavior. This allows teams to understand exactly where to make improvements in the Adobe Experience Manager stack and deliver a smoother, more personalized experience to customers.

Furthermore, Dynatrace turns analytics into real-time answers, enabling you to better understand how applications’ outages impact critical business metrics like conversions, revenue, and engagement. This actionable insight allows you to accelerate time to value, optimize customer experience, and meet your business needs.

Deliver excellent customer experience with the powerful Davis AI engine

The Dynatrace Davis® AI engine allows you to diagnose anomalies when they arise in real-time and pinpoint the root cause down to the broken code before your customers are affected. You can now proactively detect availability and performance issues across the stack.

By enabling faster identification of potential issues, you can reduce mean time to repair and minimize customer impact. With AI-powered observability, you can quickly troubleshoot complex environments like Adobe Experience Manager to maximize uptime and customer satisfaction. The result is a smooth, uninterrupted user experience.

Visit Adobe Experience Manager documentation to learn more about the Dynatrace integration

Want to it out for yourself? Sign up for your Dynatrace free trial.

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A business process is a collection of related, usually structured tasks or steps, performed in sequence, that achieve a defined business goal. Tasks may be manual or automatic, and many business processes will include a combination of both. Business processes are important because they improve the efficiency, consistency, and quality of the business outcome.

Monitoring business processes is one thing organizations can do to help improve the key business processes that enable them to provide great customer experiences. Business process monitoring refers to continuously tracking and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) from relevant process milestones. The goal of business process monitoring is to provide real-time visibility into the performance of a business process, including end-to-end delays so that stakeholders can quickly identify and respond to issues as they arise, and drive business outcomes that will deliver a better customer experience.

Benefits of business process monitoring

Business process monitoring enables organizations to understand how an end-to-end process is performing and pinpoint where in the process they can make improvements. Business process monitoring helps organizations:

• Increase efficiency by identifying and addressing bottlenecks or inefficiencies that may slow down a business process.
• Improve quality control by tracking KPIs and identifying areas where quality may be lacking to enable corrective action.
• Improve customer satisfaction by improving processes to provide customers with faster and higher quality service.
• Make better decisions by providing managers with real-time data about the business.
• Reduce costs. Organizations can reduce their operating costs and increase their bottom line with more efficient and better processes.

Digital transformation increases the importance – and challenges – of business process monitoring

Most organizations rely on many business processes across different departments to meet their goals and deliver outcomes to their stakeholders, whether customers, partners, or employees. As organizations continue to undergo digital transformations, more and more of their business processes are dependent on increasingly complex digital technologies. In fact, most business processes still rely on multiple systems, long ago outgrowing the capabilities of built-in platform-centric monitoring. This leaves business leaders with incomplete visibility into these critical business assets.

Approaches to achieve end-to-end visibility have met limited success, in part due to these common challenges:

• Business data is scattered across multiple systems, with inconsistent formats and different means of access. Code changes are often required to expose important business data, delaying implementation. Fragile data pipelines introduce ongoing maintenance overhead.
• Data at rest, the source for many pipelines, can be stale, often by days or longer, preventing real-time business agility.
• Business data lacks connection to the supporting IT context, limiting effective collaboration between business and IT teams. Consequences include delayed anomaly detection and missed optimization opportunities.

The results can include delayed, incomplete, and disconnected views of business process health, impacting a range of stakeholders:

• Business leaders lack real-time visibility into some of their most important assets.
• IT teams lack insight into how the systems they manage impact business outcomes.
• Customers experience product and communication delays.
• Opportunistic competitors encroach on market share.

Traditional approaches to business process monitoring must evolve to provide the end-to-end visibility, IT context, and timeliness that organizations need.

Business process monitoring examples: A retail use case

It can be helpful to put business processes in the context of a specific type of business or industry. For example, consider three common retail industry business processes that must work together efficiently to meet customer expectations:

• Inventory management to anticipate and meet dynamic customer demand
• Order processing workflow triggered by customer orders
• Order fulfillment to deliver orders to customers

Anomalies or delays anywhere in these business processes can impact customer satisfaction and revenue – yet we know these anomalies will occur.

• Without timely inventory data, business owners may be unable to respond in real time to supply chain issues or sudden shifts in customer behavior.
• Without IT context, business owners may not be able to identify the root cause of order processing failures.
• Without viewing the business process as an asset, IT teams will have little understanding of business process health, instead relying on isolated system health.

While the examples above illustrate one industry, it’s easy to see how similar processes or flows would extrapolate to other industries, such as a financial transaction workflow, applying for a loan, or booking and checking in for a trip.

How Dynatrace helps improve business process monitoring

Business Observability helps organizations across all industries gain visibility into their business processes, overcoming many of the challenges outlined above. With Dynatrace, organizations benefit from one AI-powered data platform for unified observability, security, and Business Observability, providing real-time observability for data-driven business decisions. The ability to capture business data from anywhere, whether that’s OneAgent, real user monitoring sessions, log files or external tools and data sources, simplifies access to the real-time, precise business data organizations need for better visibility into their business processes.

With access to topology metadata to automatically enrich business events, Dynatrace enables a straightforward approach to business process monitoring that goes beyond traditional methods, putting individual business process steps in context with business and IT data. Organizations can visualize an entire business process through a purpose-built Business Flow application or a custom dashboard, leveraging Davis AI for root cause analysis and Smartscape to drill down into host and process details.

*^{Salesforce customer engagement research}

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The White House recently released the “Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience” memorandum, which seeks to transform the way the government interacts online with citizens. Accomplishing this goal involves ensuring digital services are “easy to use, trustworthy, and accessible.” Much of the memo focuses on the customer experience (CX). The memo directs agencies to conduct qualitative and quantitative research to better understand online interactions. It also requires agencies to develop digital experiences that are user-centric and data-driven.

At Dynatrace, we heartily embrace such a transformation. In fact, we’ve worked with government customers for years now to enhance their CX. But CX has taken on new significance today with the rise of digital transformation.

Customer experience index scores are falling

Consumer organizations have set a high bar for CX. They are designing and overseeing websites in which experiences and transactions are seamless, easy to navigate, and quickly completed – whether on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Subsequently, users now expect this from government agencies. Users now expect to find what they need instantly and in conversational “plain language” that the memo encourages. They feel they should be able to conduct transactions online on government websites in a straightforward, easy-to-grasp manner, without getting frozen or bounced off the page in the mid-transaction.

This memo arrives at a time when citizen satisfaction with U.S. government services has reached a general decline in recent years. According to research from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the ACSI “score” for government services is 66.3, down from a high of 72.3 in 2006. The website satisfaction score is 69, which is also on the decline.

The five key metrics to improve customer satisfaction

To help turn this around, Dynatrace makes available its unified observability platform, which captures all CX interactions and transactions in an automated, intelligent manner – including user session replays. When combined, key metrics will generate an accurate CX index score.

But which metrics should your agency include? The following are five essential customer experience metrics:

1. Transaction completion time. Whether applying for a passport, student loan, housing assistance, military veteran benefits, etc., citizens want to get on a site and quickly wrap up the business at hand. If they encounter delays during the form-filling process or the final “Click here to submit application or purchase” stage, it will lead to a negative CX.
2. Page load time. If it takes more than five seconds to load a page, users will grow frustrated and may leave the site.
3. Rage clicks. When a website loads slowly or freezes, users sometimes click a button five or six times – i.e., rage-clicking. Tools such as session recordings can measure this, too.
4. Abandonment rate and data. Agencies need to track how often transactions are abandoned. Then, they should investigate the source of the abandoned task: Which stages of the process are slow or confusing for users, to the point where they quit in frustration?
5. Conversion rate. This goes up as the abandonment rate goes down. How often do customers complete transactions or queries? The higher the conversion rate, the better.

Observability tools deliver AI-enabled monitoring, which automatically tracks and provides visibility into these five metrics, among many others. AI will also auto-remediate issues that metrics expose.

Guarantee positive customer experiences with unified observability

Ensuring a positive customer experience is about awareness, proactivity, and instinct regarding user needs. The current administration’s increased commitment to improving the digital CX is heartening, but agencies will never know how they are doing if they can’t measure system performance.

Powered by AI and intelligent automation, Dynatrace collaborates with agencies to help them gain a holistic view of their technology environments. With granular user data and deep insights provided by unified observability, organizations are empowered to deliver seamless customer experiences.

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More development teams across enterprises are adopting new mobile UI frameworks, namely SwiftUI, .NET MAUI, and Android’s latest toolkit, Jetpack Compose. While these frameworks use a declarative syntax to simplify the codebase and expedite development lifecycles, they also introduce new challenges in monitoring the user experience of mobile apps. As a front-runner for auto-instrumentation in the observability space, Dynatrace has rolled out support for these technologies to expand its coverage for mobile applications. With mobile RUM, developers and their teams who have migrated their codebase to these new UI frameworks can take advantage of the benefits of the Dynatrace platform, which enable them to quickly identify errors and facilitate their immediate resolution. This allows developers to focus more of their efforts on innovation and delivering the best user experience to their customers.

High consumer expectations for mobile

In today’s digital world, mobile apps have become an essential part of our daily lives. We use mobile apps to communicate, entertain us, conduct business, shop, and much more—on the go, anytime and anywhere. As people typically spend 4.8 hours a day on their mobile devices, it’s natural that they demand a flawless experience. Among all digital channels, mobile has the lowest tolerance for bad experiences. If an app is slow, slightly buggy, or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs promptly, it gets deleted. In many cases, an alternative app is installed. Overall, 52% of users feel frustrated by their experiences with mobile apps.

New development frameworks from the key players

Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others, are heavily invested in development tools and frameworks. Backed by strong communities, these tools are continuously enhanced and have redefined how apps are built. Incorporating the latest advancements in technology allows companies to develop and deliver more reliable applications, resulting in smoother user experiences. To ensure consistent progress in app development, it’s crucial to stay updated and integrate these innovations into your development process.

With the introduction of Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI, the development of mobile apps has become more accessible, efficient, and streamlined. These frameworks are based on declarative syntax, which allows developers to build native UI for Android and iOS, respectively, with ease and speed. As a result, modern mobile apps increasingly use Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI to deliver excellent user experiences. According to Google’s recent announcements, approximately 23% of the top 1,000 Android apps are built with Jetpack Compose, and these numbers doubled from last year.

The importance of observability for mobile app development

An essential aspect of improving the user experience on mobile is observability. In order to make informed decisions, business owners, UX designers, and developers require data—specifically, they rely on insights from their data on a large scale, ideally in a single location. Providers of mobile apps must be able to identify issues that users are experiencing quickly so that they can address them. They also need to assess and optimize the performance of both their apps and the back end services that support them. Finally, by gaining complete visibility into user behavior, app providers can improve user journeys and achieve better outcomes for their businesses.
A key aspect of observability is the monitoring agent that a mobile app is instrumented with. This is important because the data collected—including both its breadth, depth, and semantics—play a significant role in determining the value that can be derived from automated or ad hoc analysis.

Mobile observability challenges

Mobile agents are included and shipped with their respective mobile apps, making the selection of the right agent and its configuration crucial. Frequent changes necessitate the publication of new app versions, and successful updates are dependent on users manually updating their devices. Therefore, anything that is not monitored accurately or is monitored incorrectly leads to lengthy cycles of roll-out and adoption until accurate data and answers can be obtained.

Furthermore, companies often require time from mobile app development teams to add dependencies to their agents and configure them. However, the primary goal of these teams is to develop new features and improve existing ones, which means that monitoring user experience is often a secondary concern. Therefore, it’s crucial to minimize the time and complexity required to set up a mobile agent.

Modern development frameworks pose unique challenges when it comes to monitoring. Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI, in particular, allow developers to create UI components using declarative programming. With this approach, a developer describes the desired end result and lets the framework figure out how to update the user interface. This approach simplifies development but introduces new challenges in detecting and relating user interactions with corresponding functions and context. Recognizing on which screen a particular interaction happened and providing human-readable names automatically is challenging. However, such automation is key to ensuring that developers spend less time instrumenting their apps (and that Dynatrace users can more easily make informed decisions based on analyzed data).

Dynatrace extends auto-instrumentation capabilities

The Dynatrace platform offers the best observability coupled with the least required effort for monitoring your mobile channels. Dynatrace boasts industry-leading auto-instrumentation and auto-capture of Real User Monitoring data, regardless of whether it’s for troubleshooting, performance monitoring, or optimizing user experience and business outcomes. With auto-instrumentation, Dynatrace tackles the aforementioned challenges, offering a high level of visibility into the user experience of your mobile app with no manual effort.

Based on feedback from our development community and customers, we have expanded our auto-instrumentation support to include the following technologies:

• Jetpack Compose
• SwiftUI
• .NET MAUI

Dynatrace OneAgent^® now automatically captures user interactions, related web requests, crashes, and other vital app lifecycle information when these technologies are in use (detailed functional scope varies based on the technology in use). Hence, it has never been easier to monitor the user experience of modern mobile apps.

Jetpack Compose support

Starting with the Android Gradle plugin version 8.263+, Dynatrace OneAgent offers auto-instrumentation for Jetpack Compose UI components.

OneAgent creates user actions based on the UI components that trigger these actions and automatically combines the user action data with other monitoring data, such as web request information and crashes. Currently, to get this feature set activated, developers need to manually enable Jetpack Compose auto-instrumentation. For the Android Gradle plugin version 8.271+, the instrumentation will be enabled by default. At the moment we auto-capture various types of user interactions, including

• Clickables
• Toggleables
• Swipeables
• Sliders

For complete details about Jetpack Compose UI components and user action support, go to User action monitoring for Jetpack Compose documentation.

As mentioned, analyzing user experience and identifying the specific elements with which the user interacts can be more challenging with a declarative UI. This is especially true when it comes to providing proper names and context. With the addition of Jetpack Compose support, we have developed a new method for detecting user action names. Dynatrace now evaluates four properties to generate meaningful user action names. The property value that has the most intuitive meaning is used as the name. A special sensor captures semantic information and evaluates the information from the merged semantics tree. This evaluation occurs in the following order:

1. SemanticsPropertyReceiver.dtActionName
2. SemanticsPropertyReceiver.contentDescription
3. SemanticsPropertyReceiver.text
4. Class name

With this approach, companies that use semantic properties appropriately also benefit from a better understanding of user journeys in Dynatrace user sessions.

Another key addition that helps make sense of user interactions is the auto-capture of additional metadata based on the UI component used. Metadata is stored as key-value pairs and is accessible through the Dynatrace web UI. With this additional context—for example, location in code, initial and transition states, interaction types, and more—Dynatrace makes sense of the user journey and the technical components in use. So, not only UX but also developers can retrieve the information they need to optimize user experience.

Based on each UI component, Dynatrace also automatically captures relevant metadata, including:

• The function name to make it easier to find the code behind each interaction
• The user action type, to make it easier to understand the user journey in the User session view
• And a state (from/to) to make it easier to understand the evolving state of each UI component

For full details, see Captured component metadata documentation.

SwiftUI support

Initial support for SwiftUI controls was released with OneAgent for iOS version 8.249+. With OneAgent for iOS version 8.265+, the auto-instrumentation capabilities of SwiftUI were significantly expanded to include:

• New controls and views
• SwiftUI methods(for example, onTapGesture)
• Lifecycle monitoring

SwiftUI is a declarative UI framework. Therefore, its instrumentation and monitoring pose additional challenges.

The Dynatrace SwiftUI instrumentor adds additional code to the project source code (*.swift files) during the build process in order to enable the auto-capture of UI elements. After the build process is complete, all changes to the source code are reverted.

Auto-capture support has been expanded. For details regarding which SwiftUI controls and views are supported, see Instrument SwiftUI controls documentation.

At the moment Dynatrace auto-captures various types of user interactions, including

• Buttons
• Pickers
• Sliders
• NavigationLink
• Tabview

In addition, Dynatrace now supports the instrumentation of some SwiftUI methods. When a supported method is closed, Dynatrace collects the method name, the type of view the method was attached to, and the parent view name.

Finally, Dynatrace is now capable of tracking key lifecycle events for SwiftUI views, including:

• Application start
• onAppear (for all SwiftUI views presented from a NavigationLink or a TabView control)
• onAppear (for revisited SwiftUI views presented from a NavigationLink or a TabView control)

.NET MAUI support

Starting with Dynatrace version 1.265+, our dedicated NuGet package helps auto-instrument your .NET MAUI mobile application.

.NET MAUI is a cross-platform framework for creating native mobile apps and more. It’s a combination of open source code and the evolution of Xamarin.Forms that enables developers to use a single code base to cover as much of app logic and UI layout as possible. The repo has been starred by ~19,000 users and receives regular updates and pull requests.

The Dynatrace NuGet package is used to instrument your mobile applications with OneAgent for Android and iOS. The supported feature set is similar to Xamarin.

Auto-instrumentation support is available for:

• User actions
• Lifecycle events
• Web requests
• Crashes

…plus, a wide range of options for manually instrumenting your app.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether you have a Dynatrace SaaS or a Dynatrace Managed deployment, update OneAgent for Mobile today to leverage the latest observability innovations and benefit from immediate visibility and fast value-creation with the unique end-to-end visibility Dynatrace provides!

The post Dynatrace RUM expands coverage for modern mobile UI frameworks appeared first on Dynatrace news.

The experiences users have with your digital touchpoints create a lasting impression. In an increasingly online world, these digital experiences are often the most important interaction users have with your brand.

Organizations are constantly being measured against the best available digital experiences — coming from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other industry leaders. These heightened expectations are applied across every industry, whether in government, banking, insurance, e-commerce, travel, etc. Even if an app has minimal competition, users expect digital experiences to be seamless and responsive. But what is digital experience exactly, and what can you do to ensure you’re delivering the best experiences possible?

What is digital experience?

A digital experience (DX) is a user’s interaction with a digital touchpoint — whether purchasing an item online, receiving updates from a mobile app, or power-using a business platform. A digital touchpoint may be a mobile application, a website, a smart TV, ATM, airport check-in kiosk, point-of-sale terminal, etc.

Some of the factors that affect user experience include:

• Availability: Is the touchpoint available when the user wants to use it?
• Performance: Is the interaction as seamless and fast as possible, or does the user always have to wait to achieve their goal?
• Errors: Are there any errors or broken components hindering the user from interacting with the touchpoint?
• User flow: Can the user actually achieve what they want to do? Was their operation successful?
• Usability: Are the needed functions easy to find? Is the functionality frictionless to use?

Monitoring digital experiences has become increasingly critical for organizations to maintain their competitive edge. Just as a shop owner wants to know if their customers are having difficulty locating a product or accessing the store, owners of digital services want to know users’ pain points as they navigate their offerings.

One advantage of digital experience over physical interaction is the tooling and technologies that are available to monitor and potentially improve the experience for your users.

Why is delivering zero-friction digital experiences so critical?

Poor digital experiences often result in lost business — switching to a competitor’s offering is just a tap or mouse click away. If that competitor delivers a better experience, you’ve lost not only a transaction but the future business of a once-loyal customer. You may think you can rely on customer loyalty, but according to McKinsey, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 75% of U.S. consumers have tried new brands or outlets, diminishing the loyalty factor. Working on a customer win-back strategy is cost-intensive and not always fruitful, which makes having an excellent DX more crucial than ever.

Another risk of a bad user experience is the company’s brand reputation. One could argue that having a mobile app in the app store with a 1-star rating is worse than having no app at all. Some startups undergo expensive rebrandings just to get rid of the negative image created by a single bad mobile app deployment to the app store.

What ruins a digital experience?

Here are a few reasons user experiences can fail.

1. Digital touchpoint outage

This is the hard fail. There is nothing worse than your well-designed digital touchpoint simply falling offline. Identifying an outage was easier in the past when all the services were delivered directly from your hosted data centers. But cloud transformation makes detecting the epicenter of a failure much more challenging, as outages can be caused by your cloud provider, a third party helping deliver personalized experiences, your content delivery network (CDN), and many other services you may be leveraging.

Aside from lost revenue, users and customers may be quick to call out your brand on social media when your offering’s availability struggles, as Instagram experienced not long ago.

2. Broken functionality on a critical user path

Another obvious example is an issue in the checkout funnel of an e-commerce store. For a twist on that scenario, consider this example from the car insurance industry.

Today, every car insurance company provides a mobile app. The app should help users in very rare situations, such as a car crash or if they need roadside assistance. In these critical moments, everything must work — no excuses. If the app lets the user down on the worst day of their year, they will remember. When the “contact agent” functionality causes the app to white-screen, the user will be unhappy, and they might confront the app’s owner with a complaint on the Google Play Store where they’ll find a list of competing mobile apps that may be outperforming their current choice. The window of opportunity to save this customer is now very small and closing fast.

3. Soft fails and speedbumps

Besides the outright failures, there is a long list of soft impacts that injure the user experience. Some include:

• Web performance not meeting the user’s expected experience
• Overcomplicated user flows
• Annoying “pop-up” messages distracting the user
• Web screens not displaying on a mobile device correctly
• Touchscreen UI controls too small to tap
• Menu entries not reachable because they disappear on hover
• Overlapping text on browser window resizing
• No error feedback in form inputs
• No constraints in form input fields
• Mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling on mobile

Because of everything that can go wrong, it’s imperative for organizations to constantly track metrics that indicate user satisfaction and have a robust complaint resolution model in place.

Best practices for delivering excellent digital experiences

1. Break down silos. Great digital experiences require the right culture and mindset. No technology, tool, or practice can accomplish this for you. But thinking about delivering experiences for people rather than thinking in silos can give your organization a chance to bring frictionless experiences to the world. What does that mean? Should I not follow a particular practice? Should I not use certain tools?
2. Collaborate and keep an open mind. Practices and tools are required, but to create great user experiences, you need to be open-minded. For example, I was on a call with a company talking about BizDevOps collaboration. Their collaboration efforts were stuck because the marketing, business, and IT teams could not overcome the ownership question for a supporting tool. It shouldn’t matter who owns the tool as long as it fosters collaboration.
3. Decide what to measure. Once you’ve embraced a user journey mindset, start thinking about what matters to you and your users as you define your core KPIs. Or, as site reliability engineers like to say, what are your service-level objectives (SLOs)?
4. Decide how to measure it. It’s important that you agree on what to measure and find one solution for how you measure it — not have each team measuring the same thing with different tools. Without agreeing on the single source of truth, you’ll end up in meetings arguing about metrics instead of helping your users.

Which KPIs should you track to measure digital experience?

A full list of what to track for your applications and services will vary, but here are some basic KPIs to get you thinking in the right direction.

• Number of conversions or number of “dollar making” interactions
• User experience score
• Percentage of crash-free users (mobile specifically)
• Google Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift (specifically for web)
• Availability and Response Time of API (specifically for API driven industries)
• Net promoter score
• Number of failing form field validations
• Number of displayed error messages

Once you have KPIs you want to track and the metrics to quantify them, you’re ready for digital experience monitoring.

How to improve digital experience

Improving digital experience is crucial for businesses aiming to meet the high expectations of today’s tech-savvy consumers. Here are some key strategies to enhance digital experiences:

1. Personalization

Personalization is at the heart of a great digital experience. Utilize data analytics and AI to understand user preferences and behaviors. Tailor content, recommendations, and interactions to individual users. This can significantly increase engagement and satisfaction.

2. Responsive design

Ensure your digital platforms are optimized for all devices. A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions, providing a seamless experience whether users are on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. This is essential for maintaining consistency and accessibility.

3. Streamlined navigation

Simplify navigation to help users find what they need quickly and easily. Use clear, intuitive menus and search functionalities. A well-organized site structure reduces frustration and enhances user satisfaction.

4. Fast load times

Speed is critical. Optimize your website and applications to load quickly. Compress images, leverage browser caching, and use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve load times. Slow websites can lead to high bounce rates and lost opportunities.

5. Engaging content

Create high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience. Use a mix of text, images, videos, and interactive elements to keep users interested. Regularly update content to keep it fresh and relevant.

6. User feedback

Actively seek and incorporate user feedback. Use surveys, feedback forms, and usability testing to understand user needs and pain points. This helps in making informed improvements and shows users that their opinions matter.

7. Security and privacy

Ensure robust security measures to protect user data. Implement SSL certificates, use strong encryption, and comply with data protection regulations like GDPR. Users need to trust that their information is safe.

8. Omnichannel integration

Provide a consistent experience across all channels. Whether users interact with your brand via website, mobile app, social media, or in-store, ensure a unified and cohesive experience. This builds trust and loyalty.

Focusing on these strategies can significantly enhance businesses’ digital experiences, leading to higher user satisfaction, increased engagement, and better business outcomes.

Tools needed to improve digital experience

Enhancing the digital experience requires a suite of tools that work together to create seamless, personalized, and engaging interactions. Here are some essential tools to consider:

• Digital experience monitoring (DEM)

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is essential for optimizing user interactions by incorporating Real User Monitoring (RUM) to track actual user behavior, Synthetic Monitoring to simulate user paths, and Session Replay to visually capture and analyze user sessions for comprehensive insights and improvements.

• Content management system (CMS)

A robust CMS is the backbone of any digital experience strategy. It allows for creating, managing, and distributing digital content across various channels. Popular CMS platforms offer flexibility and scalability to meet diverse content needs.

• Customer data platform (CDP)

A CDP collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources, providing a comprehensive view of each customer. This data is crucial for personalizing experiences and understanding customer behavior. Leading CDPs enable businesses to deliver targeted and relevant content.

• Analytics and insights tools

Analytics tools are essential for understanding user behavior and measuring the effectiveness of digital strategies. They can provide detailed insights into user interactions, helping businesses make data-driven decisions to optimize their digital experiences.

• Personalization engines

Personalization engines use AI and machine learning to deliver customized content and recommendations. These tools analyze user data to create personalized experiences that increase engagement and satisfaction.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

CRM systems help manage customer interactions and relationships. They integrate with other tools to provide a unified view of customer data, enabling personalized communication and improved customer service.

• Marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation tools streamline and automate marketing tasks like email campaigns, social media posts, and lead generation.

• User feedback tools

Gathering user feedback is vital for continuous improvement. Tools like these allow businesses to collect and analyze feedback, helping them understand user needs and pain points.

• Security and privacy tools

Ensuring data security and privacy is paramount. Tools like SSL certificates, encryption software, and compliance management platforms help protect user data and ensure adherence to regulations like GDPR.

By leveraging these tools, businesses can create a cohesive and engaging digital experience that meets the needs of their users and drives business success.

Digital experience monitoring with Dynatrace

With increasing competition among service providers to win user loyalty and meet users’ constantly increasing expectations, delivering excellent digital experiences is more important than ever. The key to delivering excellent digital experiences is the ability to see and understand the entire user journey.

Dynatrace offers comprehensive digital experience monitoring and business analytics that drive to the heart of the user journey. The Dynatrace DEM solution includes Real User Monitoring, Session Replay, and Synthetic Monitoring, that enables you to capture the right metrics so you can tailor and optimize user experiences. Together with the Business Analytics solution, you can start optimizing your digital channel for better business outcomes and at the same time improve collaboration between IT and LoB stakeholders.

For example, Dynatrace tracks many common KPIs by default, and supports the addition of custom KPIs for metrics more specific to your business needs.

The four screenshots below show a single user session through the lens of four different stakeholders. The insights cover which marketing campaign brought the user to the touchpoint (upper left), the session replay of an error (upper right), the waterfall analysis of a poorly performing interaction (lower left), and the stack trace of the error message detailing the technical issue the customer was facing (lower right).

Dynatrace rolls up all this digital experience data into meaningful metrics for IT teams and business stakeholders, giving them a real-time overview of how digital experience impacts business success. With this insight, teams can instantly see the root cause of any issues, or trigger automatic responses to resolve issues before they impact the user experience.

What makes the Dynatrace approach so compelling for companies on digital transformation journeys is the breadth of solutions integrated into an open platform. With AIOps at the core of the Dynatrace platform, you can capitalize on the end-to-end visibility over your entire software stack to harness data from every digital touchpoint into actionable insight.

The post What is digital experience? appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Driving better business outcomes has more organizations focusing on the customer journey. “Within the past few years, differentiating through customer experience has become a corporate mandate,” says Gary Kaiser, Product Manager of Business Analytics at Dynatrace.

And it’s easy to see why. One report found that companies that adopt a customer-centered mindset are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t. From the users’ side, 77% of consumers reported that poor customer experiences diminish their quality of life.

“Our roles as IT monitoring professionals have expanded to embrace collaboration with the business users,” Kaiser explains at the recent Dynatrace Perform 2022 conference. But in most organizations, IT and business teams work in silos.

Along with Dynatrace Insights Analytics Manager Adam Russo, Kaiser discusses the importance of customer experience along the customer journey and explains how IT teams and business stakeholders can collaborate. “The business users own the digital experience strategy, but depend on us for insights,” Kaiser says.

IT metrics vs. business goals

To align with business users, an organization must first conduct a business impact analysis to understand the goal of an application and determine the number of affected users. “If you’re being proactive, you might look at an Apdex score to identify high-volume pages with lower scores, which may have a large impact on users,” Kaiser says. Although important, these starting points provide IT metrics, not business metrics.

To understand how IT metrics relate to business goals, teams must ask: “Does this metric impact business outcomes?” If the answer is yes, then consider the following questions:

• Is the application customer-facing or internal?
• Are the users geographically relevant buyers or browsers?
• Are these conversion pages with key interactions or incidental pages with less impact?
• How do you measure customer experience?

IT teams often think about conversions, which carry across all industries. For example, a bank conversion occurs when someone opens an account. An insurance company conversion happens when someone files a claim.

However, it is important to consider the entire funnel or the customer journey from when a user enters a site down to the conversion.

KPIs that focus on customer experience and business context

Associating KPIs with these different user interactions can create a foundation for many business analytics use cases. “We want to go beyond a simple count of conversions and provide some business context or business value,” Kaiser explains.

This process is relatively straightforward because most organizations have already identified and codified business tracking goals in the website data layer. They may categorize these business goals as follows:

• Transaction data: Product, quantity, and cart value
• Behavioral data: Page views, scrolls, and clicks
• Audience segment data: Loyalty status, characteristics of users, and geographical data.

With defined goals, any tool can take advantage of this data or a subset of data to obtain customer experience analytics. One example is Adobe Analytics, which uses data enrichment and data cleansing in the UI. But many of these tools don’t capture the whole picture. “Typical use cases with Adobe share a common problem we see, which is lack of visibility into all functional errors,” Russo explains.

How to overcome lack of visibility into the customer journey

Three common reasons for this lack of visibility are the following:

1. Cascading style sheet (CSS) selectors may be overly complex and setting up a property is not possible
2. Action names don’t match between Adobe and Dynatrace
3. Naming rules might be difficult to manage because of the structure of the uniform resource identifier (URI).

But organizations can solve these problems in the following three ways:

1. Pushing errors to the data layer
2. Define Adobe custom insight conversion variables (eVars)
3. Capture Dynatrace Real User Monitoring (RUM) as a user session property

You can also pull Adobe pagename and pagetype variables, which are common across the industry and apply to naming rules.

Using these methods, teams can use Dynatrace to achieve faster visibility and automatically identify root causes of customer experience problems. Using Session Replay, teams can easily filter errors in user sessions and clean user action names using synchronous data between Adobe and Dynatrace.

Tracking the customer journey: Adobe data layer use cases

“The data layer is a great starting point for business analytics,” Kaiser says. “Many business analytics use cases can be solved exclusively through metrics and context available through the data layer.” If an organization has RUM or Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), they already have access to this data. Other data sources include real user sessions, application business logic, and log files.

The first use case involves pushing errors to the Adobe layer and capturing them within Dynatrace.

“There are specific error codes related to specific actions,” Russo says. “Then, we can go from there and filter user sessions, then dive down and see which users are being impacted by these errors.”

Another use case demonstrates how Dynatrace can enable both IT and business teams to look at the same customer experience data from different angles. “Marketing folks may use ContentSquare to measure behavior analytics, while IT uses Dynatrace to measure performance analytics,” Russo explains.

In this case, Dynatrace captures properties from ContentSquare as Dynatrace user session properties. “We’re looking at behavioral data,” says Russo, “but we’re taking into account the performance impact on that user behavior.” As a result, IT analysts can understand the effects of a problem on the customer journey, and business analysts can understand its root causes.

Gaining insight into the customer experience using APIs

You can extend insights beyond the data layer by ingesting other data sources, metrics, and context from external business tools using an API. One example is Voice of the Customer (VoC) data. “A VoC solution allows a customer to provide feedback about their customer experience, either while they’re navigating a site or afterward through a survey,” Kaiser explains. “Some of that data can be valuable to IT.”

For example, a customer may rate website performance with three stars and give usability one star. Often, there can be a days-long delay between when a user submits feedback and when teams analyze, categorize, and escalate it to IT.

Using the API, you can directly ingest VoC metrics into Dynatrace so IT analysts receive instant feedback about IT-relevant ratings. With the two tools connected, teams can switch contexts and investigate individual complaints.

“You can alert on these or graph them over time to look for trends,” Kaiser explains. You can also drill down in Dynatrace and identify the underlying problem.

“The message is to start thinking about the business tools your business peers rely on, that they use in your organization, and what business metrics, what business context those tools might have,” Kaiser explained. Then, they can bring those tools into Dynatrace to speed up and enhance critical insights for business leaders and peers. The result is a better customer journey.

The post Collaboration helps optimize customer experience and drive a better customer journey appeared first on Dynatrace news.

How do you monitor and maintain a perfect digital experience for your customers when even a single interaction can touch hundreds of technologies? This was the key theme discussed with one of our Dynatrace customers as part of a virtual breakfast Dynatrace recently hosted. Joining the conversation was our Dynatrace colleagues Naima Iqbal, Account Director, and Carl Morphet, Manager, Business Insights EMEA.

How the last year changed impacted digital experience and the challenges that brought

We opened the conversation with the Lead from a Financial Services Company explaining his role and how, regardless of the technical components, it’s all about putting the customer first and ensuring an excellent digital experience. In their case, this is specifically about the pensions element of their platform which had seen 6-7x as much traffic during the pandemic. “Due to the uncertainty created during the pandemic, customers wanted instant, self-service access to know the value of their account,” the Lead for Service Reliability explained. But how do you meet your KPIs in such circumstances? And even more problematic, how do you do this when the entire operations team is working from home?

The first thing the team did was make sure system performance and responsiveness were front of mind and visible to all stakeholders. The team lead explained how dashboards have been key to achieving this and allowed improvements in performance to be seen not just by the technical teams. The deep dive data in Dynatrace has then been used to make many system improvements where bottlenecks had been automatically highlighted with the context available for the team to prioritize what to fix first.

One of the key insights that have helped the team from a technical standpoint is the end-to-end visibility all the way from the user’s interaction in the browser, through to the front-end microservice layer (which is typically in the cloud), and into the legacy mainframe applications. By achieving a single source of truth in this way, reduces the reliance on different teams to prove their innocence and instead starts fixing the relevant component straight away. These time savings have also translated into pre-production, where sprints have been improved to being completed in 1 or 2 weeks compared to 1 – 2 months, enabling the team to keep up with the incoming volume of work.

Now everything is stable, how is your day-to-day working improved?

One of the biggest shifts the team mentioned was moving towards a tangible alignment between business and IT. This also extends to the executive committee where some of the more technical committee members have been consuming Dynatrace data from the dashboards previously mentioned, but also through the ServiceNow integration. This creates a much more efficient relationship, where executive members can “self-serve” for data relating to performance and users’ digital experience, without having to tie people up in multiple meetings.

Going beyond general performance and experience, the team is now able to pro-actively analyze user behavior and usage. One component that’s seen a huge amount of popularity is the Chatbot. By integrating key metadata into Dynatrace (using session or user action properties) such as the conversation ID – not only is there insight into the overall usage, but also does performance have an impact on their likelihood to open a chat?

Finally, with the increased visibility into performance and user experience, all teams are encouraged to get involved in SLO/KPI creation. If you know what sort of tolerances people have with different parts of the platform before they call you or open a chat, for example, you can set realistic goals on performance that have a tangible reason on why they should be hit. This is an area Carl and the business insights team provide their valuable expertise not just on how technically to achieve this, but also guidance on what would provide a meaningful output to all stakeholders.

What is the next set of challenges?

Rapidly approaching in June, Google will be tracking three new KPIs in the form of “Core Web Vitals” – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These will now become ranking signals and so, working with Carl and the team, the company has been working to get these looking healthy ahead of their official inclusion. “With this new inclusion of very technical metrics, this is creating a stronger collaboration between technical teams and the marketing or SEO teams,” Carl explained.

Our guest speaker then discussed that diving even deeper into AIOps would be a key focus, so not just detecting Problems with the platform but also taking some sort of remediation action. This could be taking corrective action like restarting a service or going all the way to rolling back a deployment if Dynatrace has detected that as the root cause. To provide confidence in this space, the team would like to move into the “chaos engineering” (with a specific focus on Gremlin) as not only would it confirm the level of observability for the platform, but also increase meant-time-between-failures (MTBF). This is starting as an activity performed in pre-prod as part of “game days,” to give teams the time they can dedicate to this objective and add their own degree of creativity.

Finally, “observability-led development” is something the team is working towards over the next 12 months. Essentially, for a new release to be signed off, a certain level of observability must be achieved – with the “chaos engineering” mentioned above helping to prove why this is necessary!

What’s been the key to success?

Culture has played a big part in the success of the company’s digital experience. Not only adopting Dynatrace into their tooling strategy but having a mindset change all the way from the top-down where everyone understands why performance and user experience are key to the success of the platform. It’s then up to the teams at the company to keep lines of communication open and, using Dynatrace, give everyone visibility on key performance data and how it affects the success of the business.

A huge thank you to Naima, and Carl as well as all the attendees on the day for driving a very thought-provoking discussion!

The post Delivering excellent digital experience for customers in a complex digital world appeared first on Dynatrace news.

As more consumers are using mobile apps to engage with their favorite brands and services, the expectation for organizations to provide a perfect mobile experience 24/7 also increases. Simultaneously, these organizations must also guarantee compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. The key to accomplishing both these goals is having effective mobile app monitoring that quickly identifies the root cause of performance issues. However, because organizations typically use multiple mobile monitoring tools, this process is often far more difficult than it should be.

To address these issues, organizations are implementing mobile app monitoring best practices to deliver optimum business outcomes. One best practice is to adopt a session replay solution that can automate their GDPR compliance.

What is GDPR? The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulatory framework that protects the data privacy and security of EU citizens. Although the EU issued the regulation, compliance is required of any organization worldwide that does business with the EU or collects data on its citizens. Regulations such as GDPR are a crucial way governments can safeguard the data of their citizens as more transactions go online and security risks increase.

Mobile apps are increasingly the way users access online services, which makes GDPR compliance monitoring for mobile experiences a crucial capability.

Multiple mobile experience monitoring tools

Most organizations have a grab bag of monitoring tools, each designed for a specific use case. Some may monitor web apps, others might focus on infrastructure and Kubernetes, and there might even be a separate monitoring tool for native-mobile apps.

App developers and digital teams typically rely on separate analytics tools, such as Adobe and Google Analytics, that may aggregate user behavior and try to understand anomalies in traffic. These teams may also have a separate mobile crash tool. Meanwhile, UX and business teams might have some limited session replay capabilities, or worse, they may have no monitoring solution at all.

“In a recent survey with our customers, we found there are up to 10 different tools added into a single mobile app to assist with different use cases,” said Dynatrace product manager, Dominik Punz. “This obviously adds a lot of complexity to the app, which can make it very difficult to troubleshoot application performance issues or resolve points of friction in the mobile experience.”

Siloed tools generate siloed insights

“Since each tool has separate sets of data, you have no way to tie it all together so that’s when something goes wrong,” said Logan Franey, a Dynatrace product marketing manager. “You know there’s an increase in crashes, for example, [but] you really don’t understand why.” The problem could be from the underlying infrastructure, or maybe a third-party service that’s unresponsive. The problem could cause users to abandon the app or suddenly stop using a certain feature even if it hasn’t crashed completely.

All these mobile monitoring tools generate far too many alerts, making it unnecessarily hard for teams to make sense of what’s going on. What’s worse, these tools may also produce conflicting answers. “All of this results in no source of truth for the root cause of the problem,” Franey said. In this scenario, every team has an answer, but no one has the definitive answer. And with no single source of truth, organizations are hard-pressed to identify the root cause of an issue, let alone take the necessary steps to fix it.

If organizations can’t solve the problem in time, they may find their customer support desks overwhelmed with tickets — or worse, customers leaving for a competitor.

GDPR compliance is a must

As if these challenges weren’t formidable enough on their own, mobile teams must now also comply with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, to reduce their manual burden. However, fulfilling this requirement is easier said than done. Various job roles such as DBAs, UX designers, and mobile app developers need access to different types of data to carry out their tasks. But manually configuring the exact permissions required for them to gain that access can accidentally open the door to GDPR compliance violations.

Personal data can easily find its way into monitoring data if organizations don’t take steps to prevent this from happening. “By recording data from the end-users app, there’s always a chance that personal data finds its way into your monitoring data,” said Punz. “Think about a caption of a button that contains a credit card number or some other details in a crash report,” he added. Without intending to, organizations can quickly run afoul of privacy regulations or privacy policies in major app marketplaces such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Organizations must ensure strict compliance without creating too many burdensome manual processes. “Overall, you need a solution that makes it easy for you to manage how you handle personal data,” Punz explained.

Dynatrace supports GDPR compliance by design

Dynatrace already helps organizations ensure their mobile app monitoring is GDPR compliant in several ways. When capturing data, Dynatrace anonymizes IP addresses and GPS coordinates by default, and it also masks personal data in URIs based on patterns. When it’s time to analyze the data, Dynatrace can mask data marked as sensitive so only authorized personnel are granted access.

Organizations can also use Dynatrace to build in privacy by design from the point of first use, allowing end-users to choose whether to opt in to having their data collected. Crucially, all this can be accomplished while keeping instrumentation simple. “All of this is handled by Dynatrace. It’s not new functionality. In fact, we’ve had it in place since GDPR was launched in May 2018,” said Punz.

In February, Dynatrace released new features that take GDPR compliance even further. Session Replay for native-mobile applications is now available, enabling teams to see every click, swipe, and tap from the user’s perspective. “We baked in data protection by default by masking input fields … and by also implementing role-based compliance and permissions,” Punz said. These data privacy enhancements allow organizations in even the most highly regulated industries to leverage customer behavior and experience data to drive better user experience and business outcomes.

Deliver a perfect, GDPR-compliant mobile experience

As Franey and Punz explained in their Perform 2021 presentation, effective mobile app monitoring is key to accomplishing both perfect mobile experiences and strict compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations.

With the right mobile app monitoring solution in place, organizations can transform faster without having to worry about process bottlenecks or compliance concerns. In doing so, they can take full advantage of a mobile-first future.

Want to learn why effective mobile app monitoring and GDPR compliance are so crucial to business success? Watch the full Perform 2021 presentation from Logan Franey and Dominik Punz below.

The post Deliver a perfect, GDPR-compliant mobile experience appeared first on Dynatrace news.

Many ITOps teams have asked me recently why end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) has become so critical. In the past few years especially, as more people connect, work, and shop online, organizations are seeking to differentiate themselves through the digital experience. As a result, one study projects that the digital experience monitoring (DEM) market will be worth $6.53 billion by 2031.

To understand why and what it means for businesses, I’ll take a deeper look at EUEM and explain the challenges and benefits associated with it. I’ll also summarize the top reasons why IT operations (ITOps) professionals need to look beyond typical IT sources — logs, metrics, and traces, also known as observability data — to fully understand the user experience.

What is end-user experience monitoring?

End-user experience monitoring is an IT process that evaluates a digital experience—such as a website, mobile application, or IoT device—from the end user’s perspective. EUEM gives IT teams valuable insight into how users are actually using these digital touchpoints, the obstacles they encounter as they’re using them, and how to eliminate those points of friction.

IT teams can also use EUEM to proactively identify and resolve user experience issues before the users themselves become aware of them. Although EUEM is closely associated with the IT practice of application performance monitoring (APM), it focuses on the quality of the user experience and, ultimately, the quality of the customer experience.

Challenges of end-user experience monitoring

Traditionally, IT monitoring only focused on individual aspects of business operations, such as network performance or application performance. Many ITOps teams still use a collection of point monitoring solutions, gathering as much useful data from them as possible to find the root causes of performance issues. In recent years, some IT teams have added tools to help monitor application performance while users are interacting with a site or app.

The rabbit hole

Because these disparate approaches only capture data related to a specific aspect of the user experience, they can only give IT partial visibility into it. For example, these tools might flag performance issues that aren’t actually the root cause of the user experience problem at hand. This would send already overextended IT teams down the wrong path and delay the resolution.

The false positive

Another way partial user behavior visibility can cause issues is false positives. For example. the dashboards for individual monitoring systems might be lit up in green, indicating that its layer of the application infrastructure is operating within normal parameters even though users still report that the app is crashing or becoming unusable in some way.

As organizations have transitioned to complex, multicloud application environments, these monitoring challenges have become more frequent and more complex to solve. As IT teams struggle to figure out what is causing user experience issues, users become frustrated and abandon the site or app altogether. This trend soon shows up in key performance indicators (KPIs), such as an uptick in the bounce rate or even a decline in revenue, prompting uncomfortable conversations with business stakeholders.

Methods of end-user experience monitoring

Fortunately, ITOps teams now have more effective ways to monitor the end-user experience. Here are some examples.

• Synthetic monitoring involves running automated scripts to simulate application performance and availability from a hypothetical user’s perspective.
• Real user monitoring (RUM), by contrast, collects detailed data about an actual user’s experience with an application. RUM allows you to view the user’s entire click path or user journey so you can spot patterns and identify opportunities for improvement.

• JavaScript injection is another popular EUEM method. In this scenario, you insert JavaScript code into a real user’s web browser in order to track and analyze how that user is using a website or application.
• Device performance monitoring (DPM) deploys an agent onto the user’s device for the purpose of collecting operating system metrics that shed light on how well the device itself is performing, which can impact the user experience.

Benefits of end-user experience monitoring: Why EUEM is critical

EUEM gives IT teams insight into the end-user experience far beyond what they could achieve with traditional point monitoring solutions. There are many reasons ITOps and the organization as a whole can benefit from this capability. By measuring what matters from the user’s point of view, IT can solve user experience problems faster. Pinpointing and accurately communicating root causes streamlines internal collaboration, making IT meetings with business stakeholders more productive.

Achieving EUEM with a digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution through an AI-powered platform provides end-to-end observability for organizations. When these capabilities are underpinned by AI, they can connect the user experience (UX) dots across point solutions to uncover shadow IT.

With this insight, IT teams are able to assess the impact of third-party solutions on user experience. IT can even answer key questions about the employee experience of working from home. As if those benefits weren’t significant enough on their own, end-user experience monitoring also empowers organizations to deliver on business KPIs and innovation goals.

Here are five reasons EUEM benefits both IT and the business.

Reason #1: Measure what matters from the user’s point of view

You’re crafting digital experiences for your customers using the digital touchpoints you offer them. Whether it’s a mobile app, a web application, an Amazon Alexa skill, a check-in kiosk at the airport, or a combination of these touchpoints, your customers expect consistently great experiences with them. To satisfy their expectations, you need the capacity for immediate incident response.

Simply looking at observability data to understand the user’s digital experience won’t help you respond fast enough. To explore how this problem plays out, let’s consider a hypothetical situation from one of our airline customers. What if it was the CEO’s family that couldn’t check in for their flight? How would you resolve that immediately?

As the following image shows, the different digital touchpoints are connected to different services. On top, you have potentially fragmented monitoring data because each of the teams has picked its own siloed solution. If you take a customer-focused monitoring approach, you can figure out this customer’s journey, the digital touchpoints, and how to solve their issues on the fly.

Reason #2: Pinpoint and communicate business-impacting root causes

Have you, as an ITOps person, ever had meetings with executives or peers from other departments who have no technical background? Have you brought up a huge business-impacting issue you uncovered, and all you had to show your colleagues was a screen capture like the one that follows?

When presented with an IT-centric dashboard like this, business stakeholders have a hard time understanding how customers are affected. They may respond with “I don’t know what this means” or “Why aren’t we fixing the other two on top of the list first?” And you probably won’t get approval for the resources you need to fix the issue.

How can a digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution help to bridge the gap in this situation? Non-technical people tend to talk about problems from the customer perspective, so use DEM to connect the errors you’ve found to real user journeys. You can then go to the meeting with information like we see in the following screenshot. This view enables you to eliminate any guesswork or siloed solutions.

This summary shows that six customer-facing digital channels/applications are impacted. The following is what the experience looks like from a customer’s point of view:

When everyone steps into the user’s shoes and sees what they see, the meeting will probably be shorter and get you to what you need much faster. Here are some other ways to effectively collaborate with business stakeholders:

• Unexpected traffic surge in the data center or A Dynatrace Champions guide to get ahead of digital marketing campaign
• Extend and automate your SRE strategy to Business Level Objective Monitoring
• Tightening the communication within BizDevOps with Adobe Analytics & Dynatrace

Reason #3: Assess third-party impact on the end user

Organizations often integrate third-party solutions like chatbots, ad providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), and web analytics tools into their end-point applications. All these measures can improve the end-user experience, but these third-party services can also fail. When that happens, it can be difficult to assess the third-party impact on the end user.

How do you get end-to-end observability in this situation? Looking at data center-based monitoring data will not give you the answer, and it will lead to visibility gaps. Those visibility gaps can turn into unpleasant meetings with digital experience stakeholders, where you potentially can’t deliver an answer or, in the worst-case scenario, you hear about the issue there for the first time.

With a good end-user experience monitoring strategy, you can close this gap, get your third-party providers under control, and clearly show the impact as illustrated in the following screenshot.

If you want to know more about third-party API-, third-party integration- or CDN monitoring here are some examples you must take a look at:

• How to detect impacting 3rd Party API calls with Dynatrace Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Improve user experience with more visibility into CDN-related HTTP errors

Reason #4: Discover shadow IT and infrastructure resources and track their usage

As many organizations now allow their employees to work remotely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams have had a hard time discovering shadow IT and infrastructure, let alone monitoring them. Questions that come up include:

• “Are people working from home as effectively as in the office?”
• “Are work patterns changing?”
• “How reliably do IT systems work via users’ home internet connections?”

With digital experience monitoring, not only can you identify shadow IT and infrastructure resources, but you can also see their dependencies and usage patterns. With these insights, you can find the answers to these questions and more.

Read on “Is working from home affecting productivity” to answer all these questions.

Reason #5: Deliver on KPIs and innovation goals

In addition to improving customer experiences, end-user experience monitoring can also help you deliver on business KPIs and innovation goals. By integrating the KPIs of mission-critical applications into a centralized IT dashboard, you can achieve end-to-end observability of your application infrastructure, move the needle on those important KPIs, and innovate the customer experience even further.

One example of a company that successfully centralized its digital experience monitoring is Mitchells & Butlers, the UK’s largest pub and restaurant chain. The company leveraged real user monitoring (RUM) with session replay to monitor user experience across its multi-vendor landscape, including Docker, RedHat, and Adobe Experience Manager. This resulted in improved collaboration among the teams responsible for real user experiences, which has increased the average order size in their pubs by twenty percent. Listen to the webinar Delivering remarkable customer experiences on tap with Mark Forrester from Mitchells & Butlers.

How a software intelligence platform can deliver great EUEM

A centralized approach to DEM can make a major difference in your ability to realize all the benefits of end-user experience monitoring. Dynatrace’s AI-driven platform method of DEM uses artificial intelligence and automatic context discovery to deliver high-fidelity synthetic monitoring, RUM, and session replay, which helps organizations quickly understand their users’ experiences as well as their impact on the bottom line.

Dynatrace uses observability and advanced AIOps on a unified platform to give your teams the precise, automated insights and context they need to proactively deliver better customer experiences and drive better business outcomes. Instead of guessing, you can hear what your users are telling you and deliver on their expectations for a great experience every time.

To see more real-world stories and use cases about how digital experience monitoring works on the Dynatrace software intelligence platform, check out the Dynatrace Digital Experience hub.

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