Today's IT managers and engineers have an incredible arsenal of powerful tactical tools; APM, NPM, BSM, EUEM and the list goes on. Each tool does a very focused job monitoring the health and quality of a specific part of the digital supply chain. No IT organization should be without them.

The strength of these tools, their narrow, bottom-up focus, is also the cause of a real problem for businesses. These narrow tools miss issues that stem from the hand-off from one node or application to the next. The monitoring tools can't see the data falling into the gaps.

Another issue is that none of these monitoring tools can show the IT manager or engineer the consistency or quality of digital experience that is delivered to the customer or employee who sits at the end of the digital supply chain.

So even with the best performance monitoring tools, it is possible to see nothing but green lights and still have a digital product or service that simply isn't working. This experience is one that anyone responsible for IT should recognize.

With digital transformation, more parts of the digital supply chain are owned or managed by external suppliers and 3rd parties. You cannot afford to ignore the impact they can have on the end user of your digital products and services. Yet traditional monitoring tools can't be instrumented on them.

What's the solution? The answer has to lie in looking at the digital supply chain from the outside in; from the end user's perspective. You need to understand not how each element is performing but how it's performance impacts on the quality of the user's experience. You also need to see how each application or piece of the network is interacting with the next.

The end product of this outside-in view is a digital experience quality metric or score. This means more than a Single Pane of Glass (SPG) solution. After all, just having the green lights closer together won't change the fact that end product isn't working.

So how would digital experience quality analytics improve digital performance?

When you can see through the whole digital supply chain and understand the impact each part of the chain has on digital experience quality, you can also pinpoint the cause of poor experience. That is when your narrow tools such as APM and NPM come into play. When combined with an outside-in analytic, these tools become more powerful not less.

Because an outside-in digital experience analytic depends on seeing down through the whole digital supply chain, it will see 3rd party elements as well as those that are owned. This allows the IT team to manage the quality of those external suppliers in a way that is not possible with traditional performance monitoring tools.

Now clearly, digital experience quality analytics would improve the management of IT digital infrastructure and applications. The IT team will be able to better manage owned and external parts of the digital supply chain. But beyond that, digital experience quality analytics can give the IT team a metric or a score that shows how well they are delivering business critical digital services, not just whether they are up or down.

Dave Page is CEO of Actual Experience.