If information is the lifeblood of a business, then applications are like a circulatory system that makes the data accessible and useful. For consistent and secure access to data over time, application performance, availability, and reliability standards need to be established and monitored. In short, to continue the metaphor, applications need to be "healthy."

Unfortunately, applications are frequently difficult to keep tabs on. Getting an accurate view of the end-user's experience is also hard. Monitoring applications has become more challenging due to the complexity of modern architectures and the diversity of end-users. For instance, many applications reside in the cloud and are accessed across the internet as well as by personal devices.

With the integration of digital technologies into all areas of today's world, traditional monitoring tools can no longer fully track applications. Organizations need to evolve and enhance their methods to ensure a positive user experience and improve results. 

The Need for a New Approach to Observing Applications

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) is an application monitoring approach focusing on the end-user experience. At best, traditional service level agreements (SLAs) measure application transactions across periods, but they may only guarantee uptime without regard for functionality or performance. Typically, SLAs rarely consider the user's actual experience or whether the application even works for the user.

Many organizations have turned to experience level agreements (XLAs) to redefine application monitoring on the end-user experience. XLAs provide more focus than SLAs on the end-to-end health of the application and not just the service. For example, a typical SLA might guarantee an application has a 99.99% availability. In contrast, an XLA would ensure that work-from-anywhere (WFA) employees have an identical experience whether working on-site or remotely within an application.

Evaluating applications based on user experiences and XLAs propels application monitoring from just assessing whether the application is running to ensuring all devices, connections, and interfaces involved in the application are efficient and productive for the end-user. This shift generally involves various collectors, including operating system agents, application programming interfaces or APIs, and generic troubleshooting tools. Doing this can be tricky without direct access to all the systems involved.

Digital Experience Monitoring with Fortinet

FortiMonitor is a tool designed to collect and correlate data across complex infrastructures and heavily reliant on third-party components. FortiMonitor uses different data-gathering techniques and regular synthetic workload tests to gain deep insights into each component affecting user experience. Data shows trends over time and can be used to create alerts when an issue is discovered, providing correlated information to help pinpoint causes and assist in remediation.

Address problems quickly

Poor user experiences often impact revenue and reputation. Troubleshooting is often a manual process by someone following basic steps. Often, it is initiated long after a problem has occurred. Fixing most issues requires situation-specific consideration. 

The challenge of finding the root cause of a problem that affects an XLA begins as soon as the issue is identified. FortiMonitor is outstanding when it comes to automated diagnosis and remediation of application issues. This Fortinet solution helps with both the manual aspects of troubleshooting and contextual factors. FortiMonitor can automatically execute common troubleshooting commands like netstat and top to supply the diagnostic data available during a troubleshooting exercise. It can even execute application-specific commands, like SQL queries, to understand what is happening within the application itself.

Automation remediation

Based on all available data, FortiMonitor offers suggestions on remediation to improve the mean time to resolution (MTTR). When a customer first uses FortiMonitor, these suggestions are based on industry-common problems and remediations that are pulled from a database. However, as new problems are found, corrected, and tracked within the customer's instance, the suggestions become more specific to the environment and include proven resolutions.

With more issues identified, the suggestions continue to be refined. This allows back-end engineers to automate remediation tasks, which are then fed as suggestions to front-line help desk experts. This gives them the ability to execute troubleshooting with a single click. If a common problem has a common solution and the automation works consistently over time, it can then be configured to execute automatically without human intervention.

Renewed focus on data gathering

Modern applications are more complex and less visible. Organizations need new monitoring solutions, exemplified by the shift to XLAs. This change demands renewed focus on data gathering across all components involved in delivering applications to end-users so that all the data can be correlated and problems can be identified faster.

The Fortinet approach to DEM allows customers to transition from traditional monitoring tools to a more user experience-focused approach. Over time, FortiMonitor can identify common issues, automatically collect troubleshooting data, suggest common resolution paths, and automate common resolution activities. This approach dramatically minimizes the impact on the user experience.

Consequently, companies maintain better XLAs and ensure that users can easily access data. While FortiMonitor is vendor agnostic, it is also integrated with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and unified SASE solutions for additional visibility for those customers. 

Learn more about FortiMonitor and how to get started today.