Monitoring in the Age of the Internet: DEM, IPM, and APM—What You Need to Know

Gartner recently published the first ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). This landmark report raises important questions about what DEM is and why we need a new category now. It also prompts discussions about how DEM, Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) relate to each other and what roles they play in modern monitoring strategies.

This post aims to define DEM and IPM, explain how they differ from APM tools, and establish the crucial role of IPM in providing a superior digital experience for users and maintaining system resilience.

Understanding the evolution of monitoring

Let's take a step back and understand how monitoring has evolved over the years, from the early days of system-level reactive monitoring to modern observability.

The role of APM

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) emerged some 30 years ago to address the complexities of monitoring applications during a time where they were fairly monolithic. These applications, typically based on 3-tier architecture, operated in controlled environments like server racks in the same LAN as the users.  

Traditionally, APM focused on application code debugging and optimization, relying on infrastructure metrics and code tracing to isolate bottlenecks and improve reliability. In a world where all you needed to worry about was monitoring your servers or your applications, APM worked really well.  

However, the sheer scale of digital transformation and the widespread adoption of cloud technologies have created an inflection point.  Today, APM alone is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern distributed systems.  

Why APM is no longer enough

With the rise of cloud computing, SaaS, and hybrid work, the Internet itself has become the new enterprise network, while the cloud has become the new application platform. Everything is online, distributed, hybrid, service-oriented, and user expectations are higher than ever.  

Businesses now rely on numerous software services, APIs, and third parties they don't directly control. Organizations can't just monitor their own servers anymore. But even if they don't own the infrastructure, they must ensure that all these external tools are performing well. When an outage occurs, no one cares whether the cause was a third-party integration—it’s the company's name that gets splashed on the news.  

This shift requires an approach to monitoring that goes beyond individual applications to cover all the connectivity, services, APIs, and internet-centric technologies that are fundamental to deliver applications today.

DEM: A step forward

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) comes in to address the challenges at the user-facing end of the spectrum. Gartner defines DEM tools as “those that measure the availability, performance, and quality of the user experience (human user or digital agent) of critical applications. This can include internal users (employees and contractors), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API.”  

At the end of the day, what IT must deliver is not efficient code, but an application experience to the user. By using a combination of RUM and Synthetic monitoring, DEM provides ITOps teams with visibility into how the applications are experienced by users. The leading APM vendors have recognized the value of these tools and incorporated them into their observability platforms.

The limitations of DEM

Research shows no single monitoring tool does it all. The SRE Report 2024 put it this way, "With so many organizations using multiple tools, it can be surmised there is value in such."

Gartner acknowledges that a broad observability platform may not necessarily fit the needs of companies looking to understand application performance, stating, “For many organizations looking to understand application performance, a broad observability platform may not fit their needs, budget or skill set, and DEM can provide critical insight while meeting these constraints.”

And while DEM is a step forward, it has two major limitations.  

First, most DEM tools, including those provided by most APM vendors, run their synthetic tests from the cloud. However, a hyperscaler’s server performs very differently from a real user’s device. Real users aren’t sitting in a datacenter in Virginia; they’re on mobile phones connected through carriers, at home using ISPs, or in offices behind LANs.  

Second, APM and DEM tools ignore everything between the application code and the user. This includes DNS, ISPs, third-party services, APIs, CDNs, latency caused by poor routing, WAN issues, and SASE performance degradation. For these platforms, the Internet is a giant black box. No wonder we continue to see so many outages and incidents around the world.

DEM tools are still very valuable, especially for development teams and SREs using synthetic monitoring and RUM as QA for the code they write. They can see real-world performance and any experience issues that can be attributed to new code releases or configuration changes. Yet, a synthetic test from a single cloud data center cannot fully capture the real-world experience of users connecting from diverse locations and networks around the world, and for that, a very specific type of monitoring technology is required.

IPM as a comprehensive approach to digital experience

This is where Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) comes in. It eliminates the blind spots between users and applications, provides visibility into real-world user experience around the world, and allows IT operations team to improve the performance and resilience of every aspect of the Internet stack impacting the application and the users.

Here is how Gartner defines Internet Performance Monitoring:

Internet Performance Monitoring Analyzes performance of network infrastructure and services not controlled by an organization but which may impact the health and performance of applications accessed via the internet. This could include Border Gateway Protocol, content delivery network or DNS, for example. Internet performance monitoring typically includes monitoring the speed, reliability and overall quality of internet connections, as well as the performance of web applications and services delivered over the internet. Typical metrics collected include latency, bandwidth utilization, packet loss and jitter, uptime and availability as well as differences in geographic performance.

In a nutshell, we see IPM as encompassing DEM while going beyond the application layer to monitor the entire Internet stack from vantage points that reflect the user's perspective. It’s a whole other level of complexity. You can liken it to having a perfectly tuned race car, but the track is riddled with potholes. APM is about tuning the engine of your car, while IPM  helps you understand the track, visualize the ideal racing line, and assess how each element of the car impacts your speed—so you can win the race.  

To deliver this IPM, platforms must have specialized tools to monitor specific aspects of the Internet, such as BGP, DNS, and protocols like MQTT, HTTP/3, and ECN. They also need thousands of vantage points worldwide to reflect the locations of real users. None of the leading APM or DEM vendors currently offer strong IPM capabilities.

The value of a strong IPM platform

A powerful IPM platform empowers organizations to monitor user interactions with websites, applications, and APIs from thousands of global vantage points. This approach helps IT Operations teams:

• Understand and benchmark real-world user experience using single-homed vantage points across backbone, wireless, last-mile, and enterprise nodes, combined with comprehensive web performance testing that delivers front-end code analysis from a browser’s perspective.

• Proactively identify and resolve internet issues before they impact customers.
  

• Reduce Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) to ensure a seamless digital experience.

• Provide deep visibility into every layer of the Internet, from ISPs and CDNs to BGP networks, with detailed insights into performance variations across different geographies and network conditions.

• Leverage AI-Powered correlation through tools like Internet Sonar to rapidly identify root cause.  

• Achieve visibility from user to code in a single platform for an accurate portrayal of user experience.  

• Establish Experience Level objectives (XLOs) to monitor experience-level metrics that help align the value of IT with the expectations of the business

Who can offer a strong IPM platform? We tend to agree with Gartner’s perspective which recognizes Catchpoint as “the highest rated vendor overall for internet performance monitoring.” Additionally, Gartner positions Catchpoint as a Leader in DEM, particularly for IT Operations and Site Reliability Engineering use cases. This recognition underscores the value of our IPM-centric approach. Our focus on operational excellence enables organizations to maintain a high level of service reliability and ensure a positive digital experience for all users.

The future of digital experience: IPM and APM working together

As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of the modern internet, IPM and APM will increasingly work in tandem to deliver a comprehensive monitoring solution that helps IT operations teams deliver resilience and performance to its users.  While APM focuses on optimizing application code and infrastructure, IPM provides the crucial layer of Internet visibility needed to ensure a truly resilient and reliable digital experience.

By embracing IPM as a core component of their monitoring strategy, organizations can gain the insights needed to stay ahead of Internet performance challenges, enhance user experience, and drive business success.  

Access the complete 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DEM to learn more.

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