Digital Experience Monitoring

Configure and use Cloudmon DEM to monitor business application performance from the end-user perspective, diagnose user-reported issues across device, LAN, WAN, and application layers, and set up alarms and reports.

Overview

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) in Cloudmon enables IT teams to track, analyse, and diagnose the real-time and historical experience of end users accessing business applications. DEM captures data from the Cloudmon agent installed on each user's device, measuring performance at every stage of connectivity: the device's own resources, the local LAN, the WAN path to the application including ISP-level metrics, and the application response itself. This five-point analysis gives IT a complete picture of where in the connectivity chain a user's experience is being degraded.

DEM is designed for use on a per-user basis for both on-premises and remote workers, on a per-branch basis for comparing experience across distributed office locations, and for proactive monitoring that surfaces issues before users raise support tickets. Navigate to DEM in the top navigation bar to access all DEM views.

Configuration

DEM monitoring requires two setup steps: adding the business applications to monitor, and associating those applications with a monitoring profile so agents know which applications to measure.

Step 1: Add an Application

Navigate to Settings → Monitoring → Applications and click Add. Fill in the fields as follows:

Step 2: Associate with a Monitoring Profile

After adding an application, it must be associated with a monitoring profile before any agent will begin measuring it. Navigate to Settings → Configurations → Monitoring Profiles and add or edit a profile. In the Applications section of the profile, click Add and fill in the fields as follows:

Click Save and Associate when editing an existing profile to immediately apply the changes to all agents using that profile. Click Save when creating a new profile. Once associated, all Cloudmon agents assigned to that monitoring profile will begin measuring the application. Navigate to DEM in the top navigation bar to view the data.

Note for MSPs: The same monitoring profile can be associated with agents from different customers. Applications are associated on a customer-specific basis. Even if multiple customers share a monitoring profile, each customer's application will only be monitored by that customer's own agents.

DEM Dashboards

DEM provides two primary dashboards accessible from the navigation bar.

The User Experience Overview Dashboard (Dashboard → User Experience Overview) provides a consolidated summary of DEM metrics across all monitored agents and applications. It contains four sections. The Agents Heat Map displays a heatmap of all monitored agent devices, with each tile coloured by overall user experience score. Clicking an agent opens a detailed summary of that device's performance. The Applications Heat Map shows all monitored applications in a honeycomb view, with tiles coloured by Apdex score. Clicking an application opens its consolidated performance view. The Applications Summary lists all monitored applications with key metrics including agent count, Apdex grade, and processing time. The Geographical View shows the physical locations of all monitoring agents on a map, allowing performance issues to be correlated with geographic location.

The main DEM navigation item provides access to the User Device view, where individual agents and their per-application experience data can be searched and inspected.

Five-Point Analysis

When viewing DEM data for a specific application from a specific agent, Cloudmon displays a five-point analysis of the full connectivity path between the user's device and the application. Each point represents a stage in the connection and is coloured to indicate whether performance at that stage is within acceptable limits. Clicking on any point shows the users or connections impacted at that hop. The five points are:

Common Use Cases

DEM is designed for active troubleshooting as well as proactive monitoring. Below are the most common scenarios where DEM provides immediate diagnostic value:

Wi-Fi signal quality issues: When a user reports an unreachable application, search for their device in DEM. If the LAN point is highlighted as degraded, check the Wi-Fi signal strength and available networks. DEM shows all available Wi-Fi networks in range, enabling IT to advise the user to switch to a stronger network for improved connectivity.

WAN routing path discrepancies: If a user reports intermittent access to an application such as Microsoft Teams, check the WAN point in DEM for that user's device. DEM visualises the traceroute path between the user's device and the application and surfaces cases where the traffic is taking a longer-than-expected route. If a routing issue is confirmed, this can be escalated to the ISP for path investigation.

Branch site-specific application issues: If users from one branch site report slow access to an application while other sites are unaffected, compare the five-point analysis across agents at the affected site versus other sites. A degraded WAN or ISP point specifically at the affected site, such as delayed DNS lookup or higher latency, isolates the issue to that site's connectivity rather than the application itself.

Alarms

Cloudmon supports alarms on five DEM metrics: Apdex score, processing time, device resource usage, WAN latency, and packet loss. To configure alarms for DEM, navigate to Settings → Configurations → Alarm Rules, click Add, select DEM as the entity type, and add triggers for the desired metrics. Each alarm is built around a simple IF/THEN model, where you select a metric, set a threshold, and define what happens when it is breached. Learn more.

Troubleshooting