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The Power of the Pivot

A look into the benefits of combining user experience monitoring with application side analysis
Denis Goodwin

The ability to view things from the end user perspective and to drill down into the code level deep dive can be extremely powerful, and the information gathered from this ability provides DevOps teams with an instant view into the direct root cause of any user experience problem they may not otherwise have noticed.

Traditional real-user monitoring (RUM) techniques provide insight into how your user actually interacts with your website or application. Synthetic monitoring, particularly when using real browsers, provides a similar assessment of expected user experience along with the benefits of true availability monitoring, third-party impact, and consistent baselining capabilities.

Combining synthetic and RUM gives a complete view of the user experience along with high level root cause clues. RUM, by itself, can miss outages, page errors, and third-party problems. Synthetic, by itself, is really only a proxy for real-user experience and can miss problems experienced by various user populations. Using both techniques in tandem eliminates those inherent blind spots and can provide an organization with the best view of their users’ experience – both actual and potential.


But monitoring user experience only tells you half of the story. The ability to look at things from the application/back-end perspective and drill down to the code (or up to end-user transactions) is a powerful root cause identifier. By discovering problems in delivery, DevOps teams can work to prevent or minimize user impact on their software.

Application and server monitoring provide insight into relative transaction performance. Furthermore, it provides an accurate view into the root cause of user experience degradation in your own infrastructure. These tools allow developers to identify issues before code is deployed while simultaneously giving ops teams the tools to address issues and communicate to app owners in real time. Providing this flexible view of user experience and application health provides a clear view of impact and root cause, allowing dev and ops to work together prevent and minimize damaging negative user experiences. Having all of this working together at the same time will do wonders for your overall relationship with your end user.

The ability to pivot the perspective from user experience to application transaction performance can give your organization a powerful view into user experience and root cause diagnostics. Put another way, it helps to answer the “what” along with (possibly more importantly) the “why” when it comes to performance issues. When these perspectives are seamlessly tied together and are easily available to a variety of technical and business users, the result can only be APM awesomeness!

Denis Goodwin is Director of Product Management for APM at SmartBear.

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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The Power of the Pivot

A look into the benefits of combining user experience monitoring with application side analysis
Denis Goodwin

The ability to view things from the end user perspective and to drill down into the code level deep dive can be extremely powerful, and the information gathered from this ability provides DevOps teams with an instant view into the direct root cause of any user experience problem they may not otherwise have noticed.

Traditional real-user monitoring (RUM) techniques provide insight into how your user actually interacts with your website or application. Synthetic monitoring, particularly when using real browsers, provides a similar assessment of expected user experience along with the benefits of true availability monitoring, third-party impact, and consistent baselining capabilities.

Combining synthetic and RUM gives a complete view of the user experience along with high level root cause clues. RUM, by itself, can miss outages, page errors, and third-party problems. Synthetic, by itself, is really only a proxy for real-user experience and can miss problems experienced by various user populations. Using both techniques in tandem eliminates those inherent blind spots and can provide an organization with the best view of their users’ experience – both actual and potential.


But monitoring user experience only tells you half of the story. The ability to look at things from the application/back-end perspective and drill down to the code (or up to end-user transactions) is a powerful root cause identifier. By discovering problems in delivery, DevOps teams can work to prevent or minimize user impact on their software.

Application and server monitoring provide insight into relative transaction performance. Furthermore, it provides an accurate view into the root cause of user experience degradation in your own infrastructure. These tools allow developers to identify issues before code is deployed while simultaneously giving ops teams the tools to address issues and communicate to app owners in real time. Providing this flexible view of user experience and application health provides a clear view of impact and root cause, allowing dev and ops to work together prevent and minimize damaging negative user experiences. Having all of this working together at the same time will do wonders for your overall relationship with your end user.

The ability to pivot the perspective from user experience to application transaction performance can give your organization a powerful view into user experience and root cause diagnostics. Put another way, it helps to answer the “what” along with (possibly more importantly) the “why” when it comes to performance issues. When these perspectives are seamlessly tied together and are easily available to a variety of technical and business users, the result can only be APM awesomeness!

Denis Goodwin is Director of Product Management for APM at SmartBear.

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...