New Features - Autonomous DEM - October 2024

Real User Monitoring (RUM) support is integrated into Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM), marking a significant advancement in monitoring mobile user experiences. This capability utilizes a dedicated browser plugin to capture live web application performance directly from the end user's browser, providing critical visibility into real-time interactions with SaaS, internet, and data center applications. This method is essential for identifying in-browser friction points—such as slow page loads or delayed user actions—that traditional synthetic tests often fail to detect.

RUM provides the following key advantages to streamline support and optimization workflows:

• Comprehensive View into User Experience : Gather a set of metrics to help you understand the full user journey so that you can take the appropriate actions.

• Enhanced Troubleshooting : View real-time application availability, usability, and the performance of underlying dependencies, such as APIs or microservices, enabling quicker and more accurate troubleshooting.

• Faster Remediation : Combine RUM metrics with synthetic metrics to detect a wider range of performance degradation issues, identify root causes, and receive recommended remediation steps.

When users report connectivity issues or blocked access to applications and websites, troubleshooting these problems traditionally requires extensive searching through traffic logs to determine whether a security profile is preventing legitimate user access. This manual investigation process is time-consuming and often delays resolution of user access issues, impacting productivity and user satisfaction.

Through Autonomous DEM's Access Analyzer, you can now quickly identify when a security profile in Strata Cloud Manager is blocking traffic and determine which specific profile is responsible for the blocked access. This enhanced visibility eliminates the need to manually search through extensive traffic logs and accelerates your troubleshooting process when users experience connectivity problems.

The security profile visibility feature provides you with clear indicators when profiles such as URL Filtering, WildFire®, Antivirus, Anti-Spyware, or Vulnerability Protection are preventing user access to legitimate resources. You can immediately see which security service triggered the block and review the specific rule or policy that caused the action.

With this detailed information readily available through the Access Analyzer interface, you can make informed decisions about customizing your security profiles to restore appropriate access for your users while maintaining necessary security protections. This capability enables you to fine-tune security policies more effectively, reducing false positives that block legitimate traffic while preserving protection against actual threats. The streamlined troubleshooting process helps you resolve user access issues more quickly and maintain optimal balance between security enforcement and user productivity.

You can define application tests in ADEM with greater flexibility and precision to ensure better coverage of all application subdomains and dynamic services. Previously, App-IDs™ are used to define the targets for your application tests. This complexity often hindered rapid troubleshooting of user experience issues. To streamline this process and enhance coverage, Application tests in ADEM now use top-level domains or IP addresses instead of reliance on specific App-ID™ tags to define test targets. When you use a top-level domain as the target of your application test, the test automatically probes the related subdomains. This approach allows you to quickly pinpoint if any network or application components related to the subdomains are causing experience issues for users, simplifies diagnostics, and reduces mean time to resolution.