Getting Real About Real-Time: 3 Steps to Historical & Real-Time Digital Experience Monitoring

Re-watching the 1999 film Office Space last week, one scene stuck with me—the one where Peter, the protagonist and software programmer, defeatedly whines to his hypnotherapist, “Ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it.”

Ouch! But I hear you, Peter, if I were back in the 90s and my printer gave me as many problems as yours did, I would be lamenting my daily work too. But as an IT professional, I wonder, how much of Peter’s discontent could be preventable today? How can we improve the employee experience with the technologies we now have?

Sure, nowadays we might not be as frustrated with our printers as Peter was in 1999, but I’m sure any of us can recall a time or two when SaaS application crashes have added a few gray hairs. As it turns out, an Oxford Economics study found that nearly 40% of employees indicate they’re frustrated with work technology.

So, it’s time to ask ourselves, when it comes to our most valuable assets (employees), how can we be made aware of their poor digital experiences like Peter’s and how can we take more proactive measures in improving them?

Consider Historical and Real-time Digital Experience Monitoring

The truth is that with IT resources no longer being clearly under IT’s purview as they were traditionally in Peter’s time at Initech, tech teams have found they have but one IT resource left from which they can monitor the employee experience and improve it: the endpoint.

At the endpoint, IT can find the data they need to monitor employee experience and productivity via Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). DEM is a practice that analyzes the totality of the end-user’s digital experience as it is being impacted by any and everything occurring at the workspace: network connection, latency, CPU usage, memory, printer troubles and more.

Watch our webinar on Digital Experience Monitoring featuring Gartner

But effective DEM requires a strong methodology to gather, analyze and use the voluminous amount of performance and behavioral data that can be generated by the endpoint computing environment.

At Lakeside, we have found that a robust approach to monitoring the employee experience is one that uses both real-time and historical endpoint data at opportune times; naturally, an approach that is always mindful not to attempt to gather so much data that endpoint performance is undermined in the process.

The following is a 3-step process overview you can use via our workspace analytics solution, SysTrack, to perform historical and real-time Digital Experience Monitoring and improve the employee experience.”

Step 1: Be alerted in real-time

Set up trigger-based alarms that alert you when thresholds are surpassed. Whether you are looking to be alerted when the aggregate or a specific user’s end-user experience is declining, when latency spikes or when synthetic transactions show an area of concern, alerting can help you take notice of performance degradation many times even before the user knows they are experiencing issues.

Step 2: Drill down into real-time and historical data

Real-time data is only helpful within context. If Peter is experiencing high latency today, finding the root cause of the issue will be entirely dependent on knowing what has changed at the endpoint leading up to the incident. With real-time knowledge of an issue and a historical view into OS updates, app usage, behavioral data and more, IT can find and eradicate the root cause of IT issues faster and with minimal or no end-user involvement. This drill down is not only helpful to IT support staff, but also to other IT staff and EUC professionals looking to fix issues that are impacting the environment at large, which brings me to our next point:

Step 3: Monitor the overall end-user experience

Continuously monitor the state of the enterprise’s end-user experience. Identify outages or issues that are impacting entire user groups by monitoring the end-user experience at the enterprise level in order to reduce mass-scale downtime.

All this isn’t to say that using historical and real-time Digital Experience Monitoring is an exact science, or one that could entirely avoid employee feelings of discontent. However, this real-time plus historical analysis of endpoint data does provide IT with the visibility they need to make the digital employee experience as enjoyable and productivity-enabling as possible.

SysTrack is Lakeside Software’s workspace analytics solution that helps IT monitor, analyze and optimize the end-user experience for business productivity. Interested in learning more about the solution’s real-time and historical capabilities?

Read our White Paper: Getting Real About Real-Time