During a recent Observability Tech Talk, attendees tuned in to discover Splunk's approach to digital experience monitoring. Splunk experts Connor Tye and Nivedita Narayanan discussed the different elements of Splunk's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) portfolio and how it can help you optimize your customer experience. You'll want to keep reading and explore how Splunk's DEM can help detect, alert and take action to address issues quickly and effectively.
Dive into the details of Splunk's Digital Experience Monitoring
"Optimizing Digital Experiences with Splunk Observability: Combining Synthetics and RUM for Performance Monitoring"
The Importance of Digital Experience Monitoring for E-commerce Sites
Learn why robust digital experience monitoring is crucial to prevent card abandonment and build user trust in e-commerce sites.
Digital experience monitoring is an important part of observing the performance and usability of websites and web applications. It is essential in today's world of digital transformation, where users demand seamless experiences and optimal performance from all the services they interact with. Splunk Observability offers two complimentary products for digital experience monitoring: Synthetics and Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM).
Synthetics uses synthetic data to identify potential performance issues before they reach customers, while RUM provides real user insights to understand how users are interacting with the service. Combining these two products provides a well-rounded solution for monitoring pre-production and production environments. Digital experience monitoring is no longer about simply monitoring uptime, as expectations have changed and the way services are hosted has evolved.
With digital experience monitoring, we can monitor changes in page load time, web vitals, and third party services, thus ensuring a smooth user experience.
Monitoring Website User Experiences with Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is a great tool to help identify user experiences. In this talk, we will discuss how DEM can be used to monitor a website. We will use a simple e-commerce website as an example. As a service owner of the website, we have noticed a delay in getting to checkout, which is not a great user experience.
We will use Synthetics and RUM to measure the impact on the website. Synthetics is a set of transactions put together that each translate to steps and actions. For example, when a user searches for a product, adds it to their cart and checks out, these are three different actions that can be grouped into three transactions.
RUM uses real data from users to build a portfolio. It requires little instrumentation and can be set up in less than an hour. With DEM, it doesn't matter what infrastructure is being used - on-prem, hybrid, or cloud customers can all access the service. Let's use DEM to monitor our website and see how it can help improve user experience.
Synthetic Monitoring Tool: Understand Your Workflow Performance and Identify Issues Quickly.
A great way to understand the performance of any workflow is to use the Synthetic Monitoring tool. This tool gives you a visual representation of what the user saw, as well as metrics associated with it. Through the waterfall feature, you can easily determine what elements of the page may be lagging and causing issues.
Additionally, you can set up business transactions to specifically evaluate the checkout flow. For example, if the checkout flow is taking too long, you can immediately identify it in the Synthetic Monitoring tool. Moreover, if you have an APM product set up, you can further drill down to the root cause of the issue.
Additionally, if the same page is instrumented for Real User Monitoring (RUM), you can get a landscape view of the different environments the issue is happening across. Through this, you can get a better understanding of how many people are using your product, and the different platforms and devices that are supported.
This helps to provide a uniform user experience across the globe.
"Proactively Identifying Performance Issues with Synthetic Monitoring and RUM Data"
Troubleshooting User Sessions in Multiple Browsers and Regions
Explore user sessions across different browser versions and regions to identify delays and troubleshoot performance issues.
Synthetic monitoring allows us to proactively identify issues before users encounter them and ensure consistent performance across diverse usage scenarios. The Synthetics Run results page automatically populates RUM data and matches it with the normalized URL of the synthetic test. We can localize the RUM distribution to the same country or area as the test ran from, or switch to global users.
RUM field data allows us to optimize user experience by providing insights into how real users interact with the application across geographic locations, devices, and browser platforms. This helps us to identify performance bottlenecks, pinpoint areas of improvement, and prioritize fixes for maximum user impact.
"Optimizing the User Experience through Splunk's Synthetic Monitoring and Web Optimization Tools."
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring and Web Optimization: Enhancing User Experience
Learn how Splunk synthetic monitoring and web optimization can help identify and fix performance issues, ensuring a seamless user experience on your website.
Splunk's Synthetic Monitoring and Web Optimization capabilities provide users with the ability to test features and user journeys before they go live, receive step-by-step guidance to immediately improve their end-user experience, and prioritize issues based on severity and ease of solving them. Web optimization extends the monitoring process by providing insights into how to improve performance, and benchmarking pages against lighthouse scores, core web vitals and industry standards.
It also allows users to compare pre- and post-code change performance, to test the results of new code. Web Optimization also assigns defects to the relevant roles, such as developers or designers, and orders them based on severity.
"Splunk Synthetic Monitoring Enhances Setup Process with Record Functionality and Integrations"
Enhanced Integrations and Alerting Capabilities for Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
Discover the latest integrations and features of Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, including enhanced metric sending, dashboarding, alerting, and on-call notifications.
Splunk recently introduced a new feature in synthetic monitoring to make the setup process faster. This feature, known as the Chrome Script Importer, enables users to record all interactions on a page and submit the file for the test setup. Additionally, Splunk synthetic monitoring has released five integrations with other Splunk products.
These integrations allow users to send metrics via HECs for Splunk enterprise or cloud, send metrics to Splunk infrastructure monitoring, and view a digital experience in Splunk ITSI. Splunk on call also allows users to send on- call alert notifications to multiple team members. To further help users, Splunk provides guides, videos, and an eBook with best practices to optimize performance.
Splunk also has a community site with answers and resources for digital experience monitoring. Lastly, Splunk ideas allows customers to submit new product enhancements or vote for existing ideas.
We hope you have gained a better understanding of the features and capabilities of Rigor and Synthetics. If you have any other questions, please reach out and we'll be happy to help.
Want to learn more? Watch the full Tech Talk on-demand, From Clicks to Conversions: Tune Performance from the User Perspective. Also view resources and all the pressing questions submitted during the live event.
