Optimize 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 Real User Monitoring and Splunk Synthetic Monitoring 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 software provides easy OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation. After it is instrumented, you can view real user data (custom values, locations, connection state, browser, device type) side by side with synthetic data. Together, Splunk Real User Monitoring and Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provide over 40 metrics that describe the user experience, and alert on any degradation of service. All user transactions are ingested, so issues are never missed.
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.
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. The tests are easy to set up, and they measure over 40 metrics related to user experience. Through NoSample tracing, each synthetic test is connected to its backend traces, giving you a clear understanding of the factors that impact user experience. Synthetic tests can be integrated into your organization's CI/CD process so that a failed test can trigger a rollback before new versions are pushed into production.
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, Related Content helps your teams 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
- Benchmarking website performance against competitors
- How to use Splunk Synthetics to get competitor benchmarks that can help you establish your own performance SLAs.
- 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 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 Synthetics 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.