Improve End-User Experiences
The end-user experience is dependent on the interaction of hundreds of components (such size and format of images, third party APIs, and backend microservices) that are the responsibility of multiple engineering teams. However, while your team might optimize its own components, you are often left to guess how the interaction of these components impacts the actual user experience.
Existing observability tools often offer limited or legacy front-end metrics, in many cases focused on service uptime. But while a service can be up and available, it might still be slow, which can frustrate end users on web and mobile apps, and result in abandonment. Even in cases where a vendor offers multiple front-end metrics, you probably do not have a way to share context in order to understand how the interaction of third-party apps, front-end performance, and backend performance impact the experience of each and every one of your end users.
As a result, it’s hard to ensure a consistent, optimal user experience.
How can Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk AppDynamics help with optimizing end-user experiences?
Assemble a complete picture of the end user experience
Putting together a complete picture of the end user experience begins with external, synthetic tests. There is no instrumentation required to gather this data, and it allows you to test your applications in a controlled manner.
The next phase is layering in real user data: Splunk Real User Monitoring provides easy OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation, while Splunk AppDynamics RUM supports a wide range of front-end frameworks. After you instrument RUM, real user data (custom values, locations, connection state, browser, device type) can be viewed side-by-side with synthetic data. Together RUM and Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provides developers with the data needed to the user experience, and alert on any degradation of service. By ingesting all user transactions, issues are never missed.
Proactively detect and prevent issues from affecting end users
Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provides 24/7 testing from over 50 locations across the globe, together with private locations within the organization's firewall to detect issues in pre-production environments. As opposed to user traffic, which tends to be spiky with noisy parameters (i.e. different browsers, sources, and network connections), synthetic tests can run consistently throughout the day with uniform parameters, providing engineers with clean performance data. The tests are easy to set up and measure various metrics related to user experience. Synthetic tests can be integrated into an organization's CI/CD process so that a failed test can trigger a rollback before new versions are pushed into production.
- For microservices-based apps Splunk Observability Cloud: NoSample tracing connects each synthetic test to its backend traces, giving engineers a clear understanding of the factors that impact user experience.
- For 3-tier applications Splunk AppDynamics: Stay ahead of potential issues by proactively monitoring the availability and performance of your web applications, user flows, and web pages, ensuring a seamless user experience. Ship with confidence by integrating Browser Synthetic Monitoring into your CI/CD pipeline, allowing you to monitor application performance at every stage of the deployment process.
Investigate any user's issue
The Splunk NoSample approach connects all front-end transactions with their backend traces, giving you full visibility into how backend and third-party applications impact the user experience. After an issue is detected, session replay and film strips provide a video recording of the customer session to help you clearly diagnose the issue without needing to reproduce it.
- For microservices-based apps Splunk Observability Cloud: After an issue is detected, Session Replay provides engineers with a video recording of the customer session to help them clearly diagnose the issue without needing to reproduce it.
- For 3-tier applications Splunk AppDynamics: Quickly narrow down a problem domain and solve frontend, backend, and internet network issues using correlation with Browser Real User Monitoring, Application Monitoring, Database Monitoring, and ThousandEyes network monitoring.
Track user engagement on web pages or apps (Currently available only for 3-tier applications)
AppDynamics Experience Journey Maps provide deep insights into users' most-traveled paths on a website or app, monitoring performance at each step and prioritizing responses based on business impact, ensuring focus on critical areas of application performance. By analyzing user traffic, developers can identify points of frustration for the users, or places where users experience issues, and remediate them in order to improve user experience.
Define and track important business KPIs (Currently available only for 3-tier applications)
Many industries have complex workflows and user journeys that correlate directly to the health of the business and that span multiple transactions. These workflows typically manifest over long periods and cannot be measured using transactions alone. Examples include payment transfers, cell phone activation, insurance application approval, etc. AppDynamics Business Journeys are a way to define and monitor these workflows.
By analyzing Business Journeys, engineering teams can track business process KPIs, identify patterns and discover performance latency, risk and opportunity. They can use this information to prioritize issues and inform on future roadmap.
Gain insight into how network and public internet impacts business outcomes (Currently available only for 3-tier applications)
The Splunk AppDynamics bi-directional integration with ThousandEyes provides detailed insights into the effects of owned and unowned networks and the public internet on the user experience.
Break down silos with shared, holistic understanding of my application health
Splunk Observability Cloud brings together all the telemetry data that you need to debug user-impacting issues. Simple, shareable dashboards show related front-end metrics, backend metrics, traces, and logs all in one place, helping you break down silos and collaborate more effectively. User-focused metrics help your engineering teams prioritize issues. After an issue is prioritized, teams can easily switch between metrics, traces, and logs with the same context and filtering. All dashboards are customizable, so you can adjust your view to align with your preferences but work together to resolve issues.
Use case guidance
- Incorporating performance testing into the software development lifecycle
- There are a few ways to incorporate Splunk Synthetic Monitoring into your software development lifecycle, depending on how you like to work.
- Monitoring Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
- Learn how to use the Splunk platform and Splunk Observability Cloud with AEM Cloud to streamline performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization.
- Monitoring API transactions
- How to use Splunk software to build out robust and flexible performance tests for your API transactions.
- Monitoring the availability of online storefronts
- Learn how to use Splunk software to monitor frontend errors, helping you extend observability into debugging throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Monitoring user experience with web page performance
- A Real Browser Check allows you to monitor the user experience around performance for a single page or a multi-step user flow.
- Running Synthetic browser tests
- Learn to create a synthetics browser test to assess how performance impacts user experience.
- Troubleshooting checkout latency issues
- Troubleshoot and fix checkout delays, with step-by-step tips on how to use Splunk software for this use case.
- Troubleshooting website latency problems
- Investigate slowness across your platforms and microservices using Splunk software, helping you pinpoint latency problems that impact the customer experience.
- Using comparative testing to drive app performance
- Create a process with evidence from Splunk Synthetic Monitoring tests that show that the app changes you want to make will result in the outcomes you're looking for.