Gartner defines digital experience monitoring (DEM) as the measurement of the availability, performance and quality of the user experience of applications. This can include internal users (employees), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API. In addition to performance, DEM enables observability of user behavior and journeys based on their interaction with applications. DEM tools allow I&O leaders to understand the availability, performance and reliability of business applications, networks and infrastructure by focusing on understanding the user experience. This is in contrast to other performance monitoring approaches, such as observability platforms, that understand the inner workings of applications.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components wherever they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, or IaaS or PaaS in the cloud). This enables I&O teams to monitor the availability and resource utilization data of physical, virtual, software entities, and AI systems — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, storage, and basic application monitoring. These tools collect data in near real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products that help organizations understand and optimize the health, performance and behavior of applications, services, infrastructure and AI agents, as well as user experience. They ingest and analyze telemetry such as logs, metrics, events and traces to detect issues that affect end users, enabling early remediation. These platforms are used by IT operations, SRE, platform engineering, developers, security teams and product owners. Modern businesses rely on critical digital applications and services that directly influence revenue, client satisfaction and brand reputation. Outages, latency and degraded performance harm these outcomes. Observability platforms address this by ingesting, correlating and analyzing telemetry from applications, infrastructure and AI systems to detect anomalies, identify the root cause of issues and quantify user‑experience impact. These capabilities enable organizations to improve the availability, performance and resilience of digital services. As a result, observability platforms support revenue‑loss avoidance through early detection, faster mean time to resolution and prevention of customer‑impacting failures. They also accelerate development and platform engineering workflows by providing continuous feedback on code changes, deployments and model behavior. This allows teams to deliver new features and AI capabilities faster while maintaining reliability and improving customer experience.