Cloudflare is building a new product called Digital Experience Monitoring, which will enable administrators to pinpoint and resolve issues impacting end-user connectivity and performance.
In the coming weeks, the company will be releasing several features for its Digital Experience Monitoring product which will provide unparalleled visibility into the performance and connectivity of an enterprise’s users, applications, and networks.
The firm has gotten a tonne of feedback over the past year from users who want to see the intelligence that Cloudflare has from its perspective as it supports the Internet and is entrenched within our Zero Trust platform.
With data centres in more than 275 cities across the globe, Cloudflare handles an average of 39 million HTTP requests and 22 million DNS requests every second. And with more than one billion unique IP addresses connecting to its network, the company has one of the most representative views of Internet traffic on the planet. This unique point of view on the Internet will be able to provide organizations with deep insight into the digital experience of their users. Digital Experience Monitoring can be thought of as the air traffic control tower of a company’s Zero Trust deployment, providing data-driven insights needed to help each user arrive at their destination as quickly and smoothly as possible.
What is Digital Experience Monitoring?
The research into Digital Experience Monitoring by Cloudflare started with its users who want a single dashboard to monitor user, application, and network availability and performance. The goal of the dashboard is to help users together understand the minute-by-minute experiences so that any issue that arises can be dealt with swiftly and protect productivity. In simple terms, users want visibility into all network paths of every user in a company.
With the massive feedback that the company received, Cloudflare understands that providing this level of insight has become even more critical and challenging in an increasingly work-from-anywhere world. It hopes to equip organisations to tackle challenging questions with the help of this product.
Without the proper tools, it’s nearly impossible to answer those questions. Regardless, it’s all but certain that this investigation will be a time-consuming endeavour whether it has a happy ending or not. Traditionally, the investigation will go something like this. IT professionals will start their investigation by looking into the first mile which may include profiling the health of the endpoint (i.e. CPU or RAM utilization), Wi-Fi signal strength, or local network congestion. With any luck at all, the issue is identified, and the pain stops here.
However, IT teams in organisations aren’t equipped with the tools to prove the aforementioned theories leading to a top-to-the-bottom hop-by-hop investigation into the issues reducing productivity by a lot and by the time the issue is resolved it’s too late sometimes.
With Digital Experience Monitoring, Cloudflare has set out to build the tools needed to quickly find the needle in the haystack and resolve issues related to performance and connectivity. However, it also understands that availability and performance are just shorthand measures for gauging the complete experience of customers.
Of course, insights and statistics alone do not adequately describe a good user experience. The volume of support tickets, contact rate, and time to resolution will all continue to be closely monitored by the organisation as additional important signs of a successful deployment. Internally, this telemetry data will make it possible for Cloudflare’s support staff to swiftly assess and report issues to continuously enhance the overall Zero Trust experience.
A look into the features Cloudflare will be releasing soon:
Zero Trust Fleet Status
One of the common challenges of deploying software is understanding how it is performing in the wild. For Zero Trust, this might mean trying to answer how many end-users are running the device agent, Cloudflare WARP, for instance. Then, of those users, there may be a need to see how many users have enabled, paused, or disabled the agent during the early phases of deployment. Shortly after finding these answers, IT teams may want to see if there is any correlation between the users who pause their WARP agent and the data centre through which they are connected to Cloudflare. These are the kinds of answers organizations will be able to find with Zero Trust Fleet Status. These insights will be available at both an organizational and per-user level.
Synthetic Application Monitoring
The problems that IT experts are notified of frequently are not under their control. For instance, a SaaS programme downtime can ruin a day that would otherwise be quite productive. However, if these problems were discovered before consumers started to report them, they would be considerably simpler to solve. For instance, this foresight would enable IT teams to alert the organisation in advance of the influx of IT tickets that would otherwise fill the inbox. The option to write synthetic application testing for public-facing endpoints will be made available to Zero Trust administrators by Cloudflare through Synthetic Application Monitoring.
With this tool, users can initiate periodic traceroute and HTTP GET requests destined for a given public IP or hostname. The dashboard will then surface global and user-level analytics enabling administrators to easily identify trends across their organization. Users will also have the ability to filter results down to identify individual users or devices who are most impacted by these outages.
Network Path Visualization
Administrators will be able to see hop-by-hop telemetry data showing the essential path to public-facing endpoints after a problem with a specific user or device is discovered through the Synthetic Application Monitoring reports mentioned above. Administrators will be able to export any data that may be pertinent outside the framework of Zero Trust and view this data graphically.
