Gartner defines digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools as those that measure the availability, performance and quality of the user experience (human user or digital agent) of critical applications. This can include internal users (employees and contractors), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API. In addition to performance, DEM technologies enable observability of user behavior and journey based on their interaction with applications.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products that ingest telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. They are used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. Observability platforms enable an analysis of the telemetry, either via human operator or machine intelligence, to determine changes in system behavior that impact end-user experience such as outages or performance degradation. This allows for early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability solutions are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers, and product owners. Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.