End User Experience - Perceptions of Performance

Larry Dragich

If something has always worked, there is a notion that creeps in that says we don't need to improve it, stick with the tried and true. Unless we are concerned that it will fall out of favor or fail to provide us the benefits from when it was first acquired.

When put into the context of technology we enter into tricky territory, trading off new functionality for stability, or stability for new functionality depending on what camp you call home, Development or Operations.

Consider the paradox when vying for limited IT resources from a highly scrutinized capital budget; too small to do it right but too big not to. 

Using the end-user-experience (EUE) as a yard stick to measure application performance helps provide the needed visibility to create tangible metrics for strategic decision making.

Communicating in terms of the EUE provides a focal point that allows IT to make a connection to the business and speak to them in a language they can appreciate. It doesn't matter if every system dashboard is green, if the end user has a perception that the application is slow, then it is slow.

We are only limited by our beliefs and the perceptions we have of what is real and what brings us value. The end users of our critical business systems are no different, and with the convergence of technology finding its way to their own personal devices, meeting the expectations of a quality customer experience for everyone is much more difficult.

Consider using the Application Performance Management (APM) framework as a reference when working to improve the Customer Experience. The framework puts the EUE at the heart of it all and creates the necessary focus point to help make that connection to the business.

Understandably, the technology saga in how to extract the most meaningful end-user-experience metrics that the business can relate too, can leave even the savviest IT leader perplexed about what tools they should use and what processes they should follow.

Before you select a tool-set or roll out a new process, I recommend starting with a simple APM methodology focused on the EUE. On SlideShare: Click here

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn. 

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End User Experience - Perceptions of Performance

Larry Dragich

If something has always worked, there is a notion that creeps in that says we don't need to improve it, stick with the tried and true. Unless we are concerned that it will fall out of favor or fail to provide us the benefits from when it was first acquired.

When put into the context of technology we enter into tricky territory, trading off new functionality for stability, or stability for new functionality depending on what camp you call home, Development or Operations.

Consider the paradox when vying for limited IT resources from a highly scrutinized capital budget; too small to do it right but too big not to. 

Using the end-user-experience (EUE) as a yard stick to measure application performance helps provide the needed visibility to create tangible metrics for strategic decision making.

Communicating in terms of the EUE provides a focal point that allows IT to make a connection to the business and speak to them in a language they can appreciate. It doesn't matter if every system dashboard is green, if the end user has a perception that the application is slow, then it is slow.

We are only limited by our beliefs and the perceptions we have of what is real and what brings us value. The end users of our critical business systems are no different, and with the convergence of technology finding its way to their own personal devices, meeting the expectations of a quality customer experience for everyone is much more difficult.

Consider using the Application Performance Management (APM) framework as a reference when working to improve the Customer Experience. The framework puts the EUE at the heart of it all and creates the necessary focus point to help make that connection to the business.

Understandably, the technology saga in how to extract the most meaningful end-user-experience metrics that the business can relate too, can leave even the savviest IT leader perplexed about what tools they should use and what processes they should follow.

Before you select a tool-set or roll out a new process, I recommend starting with a simple APM methodology focused on the EUE. On SlideShare: Click here

You can contact Larry on LinkedIn. 

Related Links

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For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

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Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

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40% of organizations deploying AI will implement dedicated AI observability tools by 2028 to monitor model performance, bias and outputs, according to Gartner ...

Almost Half of AI-Generated Code Fails in Production

Until AI-powered engineering tools have live visibility of how code behaves at runtime, they cannot be trusted to autonomously ensure reliable systems, according to the State of AI-Powered Engineering Report 2026 report from Lightrun. The report reveals that a major volume of manual work is required when AI-generated code is deployed: 43% of AI-generated code requires manual debugging in production, even after passing QA or staging tests. Furthermore, an average of three manual redeploy cycles are required to verify a single AI-suggested code fix in production ...

AI Requires Design, Not Edicts

Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

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