Move from User Impact to Application Root Cause Faster
From digital experience issues to application insight, without disconnected workflows
- By Heidi Gabrielson
- 01-Jul-2026
Employees never open a ticket saying, “The database query execution time increased by 300 milliseconds.”
Instead, they say:
- “Salesforce is freezing.”
- “Teams calls keep breaking up.”
- “The application is painfully slow.”
As a result, IT Operations teams must quickly determine not only that users are struggling, but also why.
Modern Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platforms do an excellent job identifying user impact. They surface slowdowns, crashes, login failures, poor SaaS performance, and widespread degradation across departments or regions. However, detecting frustration is only the first step.
IT teams still need to answer critical operational questions:
- What changed?
- Which dependency failed?
- Did the issue originate in the application, infrastructure, or network?
This is exactly where the integration between Riverbed Aternity employee experience and Riverbed APM+ changes the troubleshooting workflow.
The Gap Between User Experience and Application Root Cause
Today, most IT organizations still troubleshoot using disconnected tools.
Typically, DEX platforms identify that users are affected, while application observability tools monitor transactions and services separately. Meanwhile, infrastructure and network teams investigate performance issues in parallel.
Consequently, IT teams often spend valuable time manually correlating data, switching between consoles, escalating issues across teams, and rebuilding timelines by hand.
In other words, DEX tools often answer: “Users are affected.”
But IT still needs another workflow to answer: “What actually happened?”
Start with the User Impact
Aternity gives IT Operations a far better starting point because it immediately shows where digital experience is degrading and who is affected.
For example, IT teams can quickly identify slow application response times, login degradation, crashes, freezes, and the geographic or departmental scope of the issue. At the same time, Aternity correlates device and network conditions that may contribute to poor experience.
More importantly, Aternity connects technical issues directly to business impact. Teams can immediately understand which users and applications are affected and how productivity is suffering.
As a result, IT shifts from infrastructure-first monitoring to experience-first operations.
Instead of starting with an infrastructure alert and searching for impact afterward, teams start with the actual employee experience and work directly toward root cause.
Move Directly from Experience to Application Root Cause
Once Aternity identifies an issue, IT teams can launch directly into APM+ with the correct application and time context already preserved.
That transition dramatically streamlines the investigation process.
Rather than forcing teams to manually reconstruct events across disconnected systems, Riverbed creates one continuous workflow from user impact to application root cause.
From there, APM+ reveals what happened inside the application environment, including transaction traces, service dependencies, slow database calls, API failures, and latency across microservices.
As a result, teams can move beyond symptoms and isolate the underlying cause much faster.
Simply put, Aternity answers: “Who felt the issue?”
While APM+ answers: “What caused it?”
Together, they connect user experience directly to application behavior.
Accelerate Resolution with Shared Context
When DEX and application observability work together, IT teams spend less time chasing symptoms and more time resolving problems.
Instead of manually correlating siloed data, teams can move seamlessly from user complaint to impacted application to transaction-level root cause.
Consequently, teams reduce operational friction while accelerating resolution.
In addition, APM+ delivers full-fidelity visibility designed for IT Operations. Therefore, teams can investigate issues with complete context instead of relying on sampled data or partial traces.
Ultimately, the integration helps organizations:
- Accelerate root cause identification
- Reduce escalations and manual troubleshooting
- Lower MTTR
- Align user experience with operational insight
Digital experience problems rarely originate in a single domain. While employees experience the symptom first, the root cause often lives deep inside modern application architectures.
By connecting Aternity with Riverbed APM+, IT Operations teams can finally bridge that gap, moving from user impact to application root cause through one continuous workflow.
Explore the Aternity to APM+ workflow, request a demo.
