Often there’s a focus on how a service is running from the perspective of the organization. But what does service health monitoring look like from the perspective of a user? Today, understanding your end users’ experience is a key component of ensuring your website or application is functioning correctly. Having a website that is performing well regardless of location, load, or connection type is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a requirement.

Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have been around for more than two decades, and as per Intricately 2019 report, there are over a million companies leveraging CDN services from across the world. In the chart below, they have compared four popular CDNs but there are several other major CDN providers such as Verizon Media (Edgecast) and Lumen. Large enterprises such as Linkedin, Ebay, Walmart, and others have already implemented a multi-CDN approach to power all their applications.

IT monitoring and management have traditionally been focused on an enterprise’s IT backbone; e.g. its data centers, servers, networks, etc. However, with more and more employees working from home these days, and customers or partners scattered around the world, organizations have all found it is critical to monitor and manage an extended network connection to ensure a supreme digital experience for their employees, customers, or partners.

Time to first byte, first contentful paint, DNS response time, round-trip time, and the list goes on and on. With all of these metrics, how are you supposed to know which are the most important ones that you should monitor? To understand what those numbers are supposed to look like, you’ll have to get a reference point. Something that’s supposed to give you a starting point.

In Part 1, we looked at some best practices for getting started with creating effective test suites for critical application workflows. In this post, we’ll walk through best practices for making test suites easier to maintain over time, including: We’ll also show how Datadog can help you easily adhere to these best practices to keep test suites maintainable while ensuring a smooth troubleshooting experience for your team.

Synthetic monitoring lets you improve end user experience by proactively verifying that they can complete important transactions and access key endpoints. But your applications serve many users, from customers to all the employees who run your business. This makes testing the performance of any internal-facing services within your private network just as critical as monitoring your external-facing applications.

Enterprise monitoring tools have traditionally paid attention to the performance of monolithic applications hosted on physical and virtual infrastructure resources. The adoption of cloud native and microservices architectures has brought greater focus to end-user experiences delivered by web applications across different global locations. The bar for a great digital customer experience has never been higher.