What is Cato Experience Monitoring

This article explains Cato Networks DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring), and how it can be used to help IT identify issues in your organization.

Overview

Traditional network analytics are often insufficient to provide full visibility into the user experience for SaaS applications. Admins can use Cato's Experience Monitoring to assess and optimize the end-to-end digital experience for the user experience with cloud-based apps over your network. Experience Monitoring presents additional data and metrics that provide insights into performance, availability, and user interactions.

Experience Monitoring provides additional context, such as packet loss or tunnel age, to give you the information you need to determine if the issues are related to your ISP, the Cato Cloud, or other sources. The performance score can also show if a specific app is impacted from a global issue or only performance issues in specific locations.

You can implement Experience Monitoring without deploying any specific agents or configuring anything within your system. Based on your network connection to the Cato Cloud, you are able to gather information based on network traffic, last mile (ISP), and application data, including:

User monitoring - Gather and analyze user data to understand the source that is impacting their app experience. You can also use this information to see if there is a broader issue across multiple users, which could indicate a problem in your network or bandwidth allocation. For example, Time to First Byte or HTTP/S Latency widgets can show you if a specific user is experiencing issues with a specific app.
Application monitoring - Using the network data, you can better understand how network conditions are impacting your app performance and user experience. In addition to Time to First Byte and HTTP/S Latency, HTTP/S Error Rate or TLS Connect can show you if a specific app is experiencing issues.
Network monitoring - User-centric network analysis that can identify trends and patterns such as latency, packet-loss, and other network issues that might impact performance. Packet Loss and Tunnel Age widgets for specific users can help analyze potential ISP or app issues.
Synthetic probes - Simulating user interaction through probes, you can proactively assess system behavior and identify potential issues before they arise.

Based on the performance app metrics of the information we gather, the page shows you an Account Experience score. You can drill down further into specific apps or users and you'll see a score specific to the respective apps(s) or user(s). For more information about Experience Monitoring and the widgets you can use, see Using the Experience Monitoring Page.

This is very useful to help understand if a problem is related to a specific user, site, or app in your network, or perhaps the problem is a global outage for that specific application.

Note

Note: Application performance metrics are only calculated for outbound TCP traffic.

A separate DEM license is required for DEM pages and features. For more about purchasing a DEM license, please contact your Cato representative.

Application Experience Scoring

Cato uses AI and advanced metrics collected from real traffic generated by all Cato users to create a baseline experience for each application via the Cato Cloud. The baseline is based on metrics such as Time to First byte and TCP Connect, as well as the number of flows, to determine an expected experience.

The user and application Experience Score is then calculated relative to the expected experience.

Good - The user's experience is better than the expected experience.
Fair - The user's experience is in the same range as the expected experience.
Poor - The user's experience is worse than the expected experience.

As each application is scored separately, users can have different thresholds for their applications.

For example, if you have an application hosted in Europe, users accessing that application from North America or the Far East, will probably have a lower score than users located closer to the servers in Europe.

The score thresholds are updated periodically, meaning the same flows from the same source in different months might have a slightly different score

Help Desk Ticket Use Case

A ticket arrives in the help desk queue of a remote user who is complaining about poor response times from Atlassian Jira. The help desk admin navigates to the Experience Monitoring page and sees that the overall Account Experience score is Good. This indicates there is no global problem with the network. The admin navigates to the Applications tab and filters for the app for which the ticket was opened.

When looking at the overall Application Score for the messaging system, the helpdesk engineer doesn't see any global issue with the application. However, when looking at the User Connection Details, they see that the Wi-Fi node is colored yellow.

Hovering over the Device node, they see that while the experience is Fair, the Signal Strength is very weak. This helps the helpdesk engineer understand that the problem probably lies in a local problem in the user's home Wi-Fi setup and not a problem in the network or messaging application.

Supported Client Versions

DEM analytics and data for users is supported for these Client versions and higher:

Windows Client v5.12.10.3910
macOS Client v.5.7.0.1545 (including users without an SDP license).

If your account doesn't have the supported version, please refer to this article (you must be logged in to view the article).