What is End User Experience Monitoring?
End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) is the practice of measuring and analyzing how IT services, applications, and devices perform from the end user’s point of view. Unlike traditional monitoring that looks only at infrastructure components, EUEM captures the actual experience employees and customers have as they interact with digital services.
According to Gartner, EUEM gives IT teams objective visibility into whether business-critical applications are performing as expected, wherever users are located—inside the office, remote, or on mobile devices.
What are the essential features of EUEM tools?
Leading EUEM platforms include:
- Holistic visibility – Insights into application, network, and device performance in one view.
- Device health tracking – Monitoring CPU, memory, Wi-Fi, and endpoint conditions that affect experience.
- Application activity monitoring – Measuring response times and success rates in the context of real application workflows (e.g., “submit a claim” or “look up a patient record”).
- User Sentiment – Capture how employees feel about their digital experience through in-app surveys and feedback mechanisms, then correlate sentiment with technical performance data to uncover hidden friction points and improve satisfaction.
- Broad device coverage – Extends monitoring to mobile VDI, DaaS, and laptop/desktop devices and applications.
- Analytics & Automated Remediation – Apply machine learning and advanced AI to detect anomalies, establish baselines, and correlate issues across devices, networks, and applications—then trigger automated remediations to resolve problems before they impact end users.
- Session Replay – Reconstruct user sessions step by step to see exactly what the user experienced, enabling support teams to quickly diagnose performance issues, validate complaints, and improve application usability.
What are the main approaches to End User Experience Monitoring?
EUEM typically combines four approaches to deliver a complete picture:
1. Synthetic Monitoring – Scripts simulate user interactions to proactively test app availability and performance.
2. Real User Monitoring (RUM) – RUM collects data passively in real time as real users navigate an app or site to capture actual user session performance.
3. JavaScript Injection (Browser Monitoring) – Tracks how fast users see content load in their browsers and how responsive web apps feel.
4. Digital Employee Experience (DEX) – Device-based monitoring that gathers data from the endpoint itself, including application response times, crashes, and device resource usage.
These methods are often used together, ensuring IT teams can both predict issues before they occur and diagnose problems in real time.
Why is End User Experience Monitoring necessary?
End User Experience Monitoring is essential because traditional infrastructure metrics often don’t show the real impact on the business. High CPU or low packet loss may look fine, but if users can’t complete critical workflows, like checking out, or accessing patient records, the business suffers.
At the same time, user expectations have never been higher: employees and customers alike demand fast, seamless digital experiences. EUEM bridges this gap by tying technical performance to business outcomes and user sentiment, ensuring IT can deliver experiences that directly support productivity, revenue, and satisfaction.
Without EUEM, IT often struggles with:
- Slow resolution – IT can’t determine whether issues stem from the app, the network, or the user’s device.
- Employee frustration – Productivity drops when digital experiences are unreliable.
- Business impact – Poor digital performance directly affects revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation.
By monitoring what users actually experience, EUEM helps IT teams prioritize fixes based on business impact, cut mean time to resolution, and prove the value of IT services.
Key Takeaways
- End User Experience Monitoring provides a holistic view of performance across devices, apps, networks, and business workflows.
- EUEM complements traditional infrastructure monitoring, filling visibility gaps created by cloud, SaaS, remote work, and Zero Trust architectures.
- By combining synthetic tests, real user monitoring, browser-based metrics, and device insights, Riverbed EUEM ensures reliable digital experiences that drive productivity and customer satisfaction
Learn how Riverbed makes EUEM actionable.
