But here's the catch: your users might tell a different story even when your APM tools say everything is running smoothly.
That's where Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) comes in. DEM captures the user side of the experience—how real people interact with your application, what they see, and how fast or smooth that experience feels to them. While APM shows you how your systems perform, DEM tells you whether your users are having a good experience.
In short, APM shows you if your app is healthy. DEM shows you if your users are happy.
Each tool offers important insights on its own. But when you use APM and DEM together, you get a much more complete and actionable view, a combination that becomes more critical than ever.
The Difference Between Knowing and Seeing
Imagine your app is technically working fine. All your APM dashboards are green: response times are low, error rates are normal, everything looks stable. But your support tickets are spiking, and user reviews mention slow load times and frustrating glitches.
What gives?
This is the gap between APM and DEM. APM focuses on internal performance. It tells you what's happening inside the application and infrastructure. But it doesn't always capture what end users actually experience. Network latency, third-party script delays, browser issues, or regional content delivery problems might never show up in your APM data.
DEM fills in those blind spots. It shows you where users are hitting friction in the real world: long load times, UI lag, failed transactions, or unexpected drop-offs in the user journey.
With DEM, you don’t just know there’s an issue; you can see where and when users are affected. And when DEM shows you where the problem is, APM helps you understand why it's happening. Together, they take the guesswork out of performance management.
Visibility That Scales With Complexity
Modern applications are rarely simple. They're distributed across multiple clouds, rely on APIs, integrate with third-party services, and serve users around the globe. That complexity means there are more places where things can go wrong, and more pressure on teams to find and fix issues quickly.
Using APM and DEM side by side gives teams:
- Full-stack insight: From backend services and APIs to frontend experiences and user journeys.
- Faster root cause analysis: DEM shows where users struggle; APM shows what's causing the problem.
- Fewer blind spots: Whether it’s a CDN hiccup or a JavaScript error in a user’s browser, the issue is visible.
- Aligned teams: Everyone from DevOps to IT to customer support works from the same data, reducing finger-pointing and improving collaboration.
With SolarWinds® Observability, DEM and APM are integrated into a single platform, giving you a unified view of performance across the entire digital experience. You don’t need to juggle multiple tools or piece together data manually. The context you need is already connected.
Why It Matters More Than Ever
User expectations have never been higher. Whether they're logging in from a desktop, tablet, or mobile app, they expect fast, reliable, and seamless experiences. And they don’t care if the backend looks healthy; they care about what they experience.
That’s why monitoring infrastructure and application performance in isolation is insufficient. Teams need to see the big picture. And that means combining the inside-out view of APM with the outside-in perspective of DEM.
This is especially critical for organizations:
- Rolling out new digital services
- Operating across hybrid or multi-cloud environments
- Managing remote or global user bases
- Supporting complex, distributed applications
When you pair DEM with APM, you move from reactive to proactive. You catch performance issues before they impact users. You reduce downtime. You improve customer satisfaction. And you make smarter decisions with better data.
Connecting the Dots Between Performance and Experience
If your monitoring strategy relies on APM alone, you only see half the story. To truly understand how your applications are performing and how your users are experiencing them, you need both sides of the equation.
Combining APM and DEM in SolarWinds Observability gives you a unified, end-to-end view of your digital environment. It’s a smarter way to manage complexity, improve performance, and keep your users happy without adding more tools or overhead.
When it comes to the digital experience, technical health is only half the battle. The real win is making sure your users feel it too.
Ready to see how DEM and APM work better together?
Explore how SolarWinds Observability brings full-stack performance and user experience monitoring into one platform.
