The Evolution of User Experience & Why Monitoring Must Transform
Your website is no longer the only portal where users interact with your brand. User experience has evolved from being focused on a company’s website or app to a mesh of digital touchpoints. Organizations must realize that users connect with them everywhere.
That makes life more challenging for NetOps teams, because customers don’t care whose fault an outage or a slowdown is. If an issue at a third-party provider you rely on impacts your users’ experience, customers won’t blame the third-party provider, they’ll blame you.
To deliver high-quality digital experiences, and drive real business results, you need every service in your digital ecosystem performing as expected. That means it’s time to rethink how you monitor and assure user experiences across today’s complex, interconnected web of apps, APIs, and networks.
Then vs. Now: How User Experience Has Changed
When the Internet boom kicked in around the turn of the millennium, digital experiences were much simpler. You had static websites running from on-premises servers with fewer dependencies. Faults were relatively trivial to diagnose and fix because there were so few links in the chain.
Compare that to today. Now you have apps and sites hosted in cloud environments, relying on third-party APIs, authentication, and payment gateways to remain fully functional. You’re using CDNs to improve performance and a host of other components and frameworks, almost all of which you have no direct control over. You have dependencies upon dependencies—if the cloud provider that’s hosting your payment gateway goes down, for example, your customers suffer even though you may have no direct relationship with the cloud provider itself.
Today, monitoring is all about span of control. You need a proactive way to see when issues, whether internal or external, are about to impact your business, so you can act before users ever feel it. That’s why assurance has emerged as a critical layer, providing continuous, end-to-end validation of experience across today’s fragmented digital ecosystem.
The New Reality: Shared Responsibility
So much now lives outside your span of control, thanks to the speed, scale, and cost benefits of the cloud. But that shift has also fragmented accountability.
In this shared responsibility model, cloud providers help ensure the infrastructure runs smoothly, but application performance, access, and security are still on you. When something breaks, you can’t just call the cloud provider and expect a fix.
That shared responsibility model means we need to rethink our approach to monitoring. Traditional monitoring answers “is my system up?” Modern monitoring must ask “is my user’s experience intact?”
The goal is to spot issues before users ever feel them, long before support tickets begin to accumulate. Even if the problem lies with a third-party provider, you can stay ahead by alerting them and driving faster resolution. When you can say, “Here’s the issue, go look here,” you’re not just proactive, you’re accelerating the fix for everyone. In the world of digital experience, context is king.
Proactive, Not Reactive
This view across your entire user experience chain means you’re becoming proactive in identifying problems, not reactive.
Relying on provider status pages is often not enough, by the time an issue is acknowledged, diagnosed, and posted, your users have already felt the pain.
In today’s tangled web of digital dependencies, you might not even know which outage is causing your problem. You could be three hops away from the real issue. If your authentication fails because your provider’s provider is down, no one’s going to alert you—it’s not their job. That’s why visibility across the entire chain is everything.
You can’t create alerts for every possible third-party issue, and you shouldn’t try. Alert fatigue is real. What you need is focus: the ability to zero in on the problems that actually impact your customers’ experience and tune out everything else.
This proactive, focused strategy is core to achieving a next-generation assurance approach that’s critical for success in today's digital environment. It’s not just about reacting to issues, it’s about anticipating them. With deep visibility into Internet conditions like latency, jitter, or emerging outages, assurance helps you stay one step ahead, testing scenarios and predicting the impact of every change. The real question becomes: what single action will fix the most problems? Smart visibility helps you find it, and act before disruption hits, allowing you to assure great digital experiences for your users.
The Business Impact
Poor user experience creates churn which leads to lost revenue. Everybody knows that, but not everybody has the capability to measure it. Cisco ThousandEyes enables you to locate solid evidence for that correlation and its precise impact.
When I worked in the cybersecurity industry, the number one question from every board was, “Hey, we just gave you $5 million, you bought all this security technology, are we more secure than before we made that investment? And if so, how much more secure?” Those are hard questions to answer definitively.
Now replace cybersecurity with user experience. If we invest in an assurance solution like Cisco ThousandEyes, is our user experience better? And if so, how much better? And I love that teams can answer that question immediately, saying something like: “Our mean time to resolve an issue has shortened substantially over the past quarter,” for example.
Being able to proactively assure user experience across your entire service delivery chain provides a significant advantage for business, helping accelerate troubleshooting and empowering teams to address potential issues proactively.
Building the Foundation of Trust
In summary, user experience now lives everywhere—monitoring must too. Today’s mesh of connected digital experiences needs a proactive, collaborative, and context-aware assurance approach. It’s not just a competitive advantage; it offers significant financial benefits.
You need to be able to assure not only your own environment, but also every environment that could impact your user experience, including the “unknown unknowns.” Your span of control is limited, but your visibility should not be.