In short: a monitoring tool keeps a constant watch on the availability and performance of your applications, websites, APIs and voice services, so you can spot an issue before your users do. It helps keep your information system running smoothly, 24/7, and lets you react quickly when an incident occurs. To choose the right one, start from what you want to monitor: your infrastructure (infrastructure monitoring), your code (APM) or your users’ journeys (synthetic monitoring, DEM).
For a business, digital journeys have become critical. The slightest anomaly has direct consequences on revenue, customer satisfaction and reputation. This is where a monitoring tool comes in: it continuously monitors the availability and performance of your applications, websites, APIs and voice services, before your users are affected.
But not all monitoring tools are created equal. Traditional IT infrastructure monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), which focuses on what your users really experience, are very different. This guide helps you see clearly.
💡 Looking for a solution? This article explains how IT monitoring works. To see our solution right away, visit our page dedicated to IT monitoring →
What is a monitoring tool?
A monitoring tool is software that constantly checks that your applications, websites, APIs or voice services are available and performing well. It can monitor from the inside, on your network’s servers and services, or from the outside, over the internet, as a user would.
Web application monitoring (or surveillance) involves checking the availability and usability of an application. Its primary goal is to assess the browsing and access conditions for users. This monitoring is typically performed externally, using checkpoints located around the world.
By monitoring users’ interactions with the website, this practice enables you to test the proper functioning of the application and improve its online performance. In addition, monitoring enables you to identify problems encountered by users of your website or applications, and to evaluate performance.
There are two types of monitoring: internal and external. Internal monitoring focuses on the operation of servers and services within the company’s internal network. External monitoring, on the other hand, focuses on applications accessible from outside the company (the internet), verifying that they are functioning properly from both the user’s perspective and the server’s perspective.
What are the types of monitoring tools?
There are three main types of monitoring tools. Infrastructure monitoring looks at servers and networks. Application monitoring, or APM, tracks code and infrastructure. Digital Experience Monitoring, or DEM, takes the end user’s side. The three complement each other.
Before choosing a monitoring tool, it is essential to understand the three main approaches to monitoring and how they complement each other:
| Criterion | Infrastructure monitoring | APM | DEM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meaning | IT Monitoring | Application Performance Monitoring | Digital Experience Monitoring |
| Point of view | Servers, Networks | Code & Infrastructure | End user |
| Type of monitoring | Reactive | Reactive (technical alerts) | Proactive & synthetic |
| Detects before an incident occurs? | No | No, reactive | Yes, 24 hours a day |
| Complete user journey? | No | No | Yes, from start to finish |
| Visible business impact? | No | No | Yes: conversion, MTTR, NPS |
| Ideal for | CIO, IT infrastructure teams | Dev / DevOps | Key Accounts, E-commerce, Banking |
| Example of a tool | Network monitoring tools | APM solutions on the market | 2Be-FFICIENT |
DEM complements APM tools: while APM solutions monitor infrastructure and code, DEM monitors the actual user experience. These are two complementary approaches, not competing ones.
What is a monitoring tool used for?
A monitoring tool is used to make sure your infrastructure, software and services stay available and perform well. It spots malfunctions in real time, 24/7, so you can step in before your users are affected.
The purpose of IT monitoring is to ensure the availability and performance of the infrastructure, equipment, software, and processes that support data.
Thanks to this monitoring, any malfunction or potential risk of malfunction can be detected at an early stage. This enables the company to monitor the performance and availability of its information system in real time. Information such as storage capacity, update delays, anomalies, etc., can be obtained at a glance.
By implementing continuous monitoring of IT resources, it becomes possible to anticipate potential anomalies and quickly deploy appropriate solutions to minimize the impact and prevent problems before they arise. IT monitoring allows for the effective oversight of infrastructure and networks to prevent outages. As such, IT monitoring serves as a decision-making tool in the event of issues that could compromise the integrity of the IT infrastructure.
Today’s monitoring solutions are highly advanced, offering the ability to check the status and performance of a company’s IT resources in real time (24 hours a day, 7 days a week).
What are the benefits of a monitoring tool?
A monitoring tool gives a continuous, overall view of the information system. It helps your IT department anticipate and decide, makes interventions easier and limits the cost of outages.
The implementation of a monitoring tool enables global supervision of the company’s IT network, providing 24/7 monitoring. This solution facilitates management of the company’s entire information system (IS).
IT monitoring also helps prevent risks by identifying malfunctions and potential failures in real time. This enables the IT department to make informed decisions to adjust IT capacity to the company’s needs before alert thresholds are reached.
Monitoring also contributes to IT system security: it highlights spikes in activity or unusual workloads, which can signal a problem.
In addition, IT monitoring helps reduce costs. By ensuring consistent application performance, monitoring software enables companies to streamline their daily operations.
Efficient management of your company’s IT assets
IT system stability and security are major challenges for companies. IT monitoring offers a relevant solution to these challenges. By ensuring efficient, real-time management of the IT network, it promotes the smooth running of day-to-day operations, with positive repercussions for the company’s organization and financial situation.
Easier intervention through network monitoring
Real-time monitoring tools offer the advantage of quickly detecting network issues, resolving them, and improving IT performance. They enable proactive responses by providing the information needed for preventive or corrective actions.
Save money by securing your IT system
IT system outages can have a costly impact on businesses. They lead to delays in tasks and additional expenses related to IT maintenance. That is why it makes sense to implement a monitoring tool to ensure continuous oversight of IT resources.
IT monitoring also offers advantages for remote working, enabling efficient control of technological resources and preventing security vulnerabilities.
Why invest in a monitoring tool?
Investing in a monitoring tool makes sense because outages and errors are expensive. According to the ITIC 2024 survey, one hour of downtime costs more than $300,000 for 90% of the firms surveyed (ITIC, 2024).
Real-world case at 2Be-FFICIENT: in a French retail bank (April-May 2026), over four weeks, 2,929 incidents were resolved and more than 152,000 observations analyzed. The average MTTR (mean time to resolution), measured with 2Be-FFICIENT synthetic monitoring, stood at 73.6 minutes. Journeys covered: customer account, messaging, appointment booking and signing, across web and mobile applications. (Internal 2Be-FFICIENT data, anonymized.)
Undetected digital failures have a direct and measurable cost. Here are the key industry figures:
| Sector | Key figure | Impact on your business |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile | 53% of mobile visits are likely to be abandoned if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load (Google, 2016) | Direct loss of loyal customers |
| Global web | 39.6% of visits affected by frustration in 2023 (Contentsquare, Digital Experience Benchmark 2024) | Decline in the conversion rate |
| All sectors | One hour of downtime costs more than $300,000 for 90% of the firms surveyed (ITIC, 2024) | Direct cost of every hour of downtime |
| E-commerce | Average shopping cart abandonment rate: 70.22%; 17% of shoppers who abandon cite a site with errors or crashes (Baymard Institute) | Loss of direct revenue on each transaction |
An undetected incident on a critical journey therefore has a direct cost, which grows with every minute of downtime. Proactive monitoring, and more specifically Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), allows you to detect these anomalies before your users do.
What does a monitoring tool monitor?
Depending on the case, a monitoring tool monitors hardware, the system, software, backups, updates and application availability. As soon as a probe detects an anomaly, it triggers an alert.
To ensure application performance, IT departments and teams responsible for the customer experience implement comprehensive monitoring of their online services. These teams use a variety of monitoring tools, each with its own specific features.
Monitoring can encompass a wide range of elements, depending on the tools used:
- Hardware status, including temperature, disk status and RAID redundancy.
- The system, by monitoring the number of processes, ping and administration services.
- Software, especially web servers and databases.
- Correct execution of backups.
- System and package updates.
- The availability of applications and the ability for users to accomplish what they came to the site to do.
These probes can also be used to detect any abnormal infrastructure or application behavior.
By deploying application probes outside the hosting network, it is possible to identify outages that occur outside the hosting provider’s infrastructure. This includes incidents related to interconnections with a carrier or third-party applications.
Management of alerts generated by monitoring tools
In monitoring tools, as soon as a critical alert is triggered, the alert system is automatically activated, notifying internal teams. The teams then take action on the hardware or software to restore service as quickly as possible.
To accurately detect issues, it’s worth looking into synthetic monitoring. With this type of monitoring, the tool doesn’t wait for users to report a problem. Instead, it simulates complete user scenarios, just as your users would, on the devices, browsers, and operating systems of your choice.
These scenarios can include any actions a visitor might take: authentication, using a checkout process on an e-commerce site, or accessing the customer portal of an application. They enable a thorough identification of issues within applications, and it is even possible to view a video of the browsing session for in-depth analysis.
To understand why this approach has become essential in 2026, check out our comprehensive guide: Website Monitoring: Why Monitoring Availability Is No Longer Enough →
How do you choose a monitoring tool?
To choose a monitoring tool, start from what you want to monitor. For the infrastructure, a network monitoring tool. For the code, an APM tool. For your user journeys (login, payment, forms), a synthetic monitoring tool focused on the digital experience.
Each solution designed for web application monitoring has its own features, advantages, and disadvantages. It’s up to you to choose the solution that best fits your needs and resources.
The 2Be-FFICIENT solution
This is a comprehensive monitoring solution that allows you to monitor your website, mobile app, or business applications. With a focus on the user experience, 2Be-FFICIENT simulates your visitors’ actions along the customer journeys of your choice and alerts you as soon as a slowdown or malfunction is detected.
Thanks to our innovative solution, our bots use real devices, browsers, and operating systems to simulate actual user behavior across your customer journeys. This allows us to accurately measure the availability and performance of your websites and mobile apps.
Our bots perform specific actions such as navigating websites, interacting with interface elements, filling out forms, and much more. This provides you with reliable data that accurately reflects the user experience, enabling you to optimize your platforms and ensure customer satisfaction.
One of the advantages of the 2Be-FFICIENT solution is its ability to perform graphical and textual searches, which helps identify issues that are difficult to detect using other solutions. All alerts are accompanied by a preliminary diagnosis, allowing you to quickly identify the causes of the issue and restore service as soon as possible.
The solution also allows you to monitor both the technical performance of your applications (uptime, response times, etc.) and your users’ experience. It’s the ideal tool if you want to gain insight into your users’ experience.
By choosing 2Be-FFICIENT, you gain the benefit of a trusted third party. Our metrics are provided in a neutral and objective manner, enabling you to establish robust and reliable service level agreements (SLAs).
Go further
Frequently Asked Questions About Monitoring Tools
What is the difference between a monitoring tool and an APM tool?
An APM tool and a DEM-focused monitoring tool don’t look at the same thing. APM monitors technical performance from the inside: code, infrastructure, servers. DEM looks at what your users actually experience along their critical journeys. The two complement each other: APM finds the technical cause, DEM measures the real impact on the user.
How do you choose the right monitoring tool for your business?
The right monitoring tool for your business depends on your use case. To monitor your IT infrastructure, go for a network monitoring tool. To track your applications from your users’ point of view (payment funnel, login, forms), choose a synthetic monitoring tool focused on the digital experience. If you are a large enterprise with critical journeys (banking, e-commerce, insurance), DEM is the most suitable solution.
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring automatically simulates user journeys, at regular intervals, from outside your infrastructure, 24/7. Bots repeat the actions of a real user (logging in, adding items to the cart, checking out, subscribing…). They detect anomalies before your customers run into them.
Does a monitoring tool require installation on the infrastructure?
An external synthetic monitoring tool requires no installation on your infrastructure. The bots sit outside your infrastructure. You don’t need to change anything in your IT systems, there is no agent to install, and production is not affected. Deployment is fast and non-intrusive.
What are the key KPIs to track using a monitoring tool?
The key KPIs of a monitoring tool are first uptime, average response time, MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) and the success rate of critical journeys. If your monitoring focuses on user experience, add the error rate at critical steps (authentication, payment, subscription). Also track the correlation between detected incidents and conversion rates.
Can the monitoring tool monitor iOS and Android mobile apps?
Yes, a monitoring tool can monitor iOS and Android mobile apps. Advanced synthetic monitoring solutions test journeys on real physical mobile devices, not emulators, and across all browsers and operating systems. They spot mobile-specific anomalies that are invisible in a desktop test: SMS authentication, push notifications, performance on 4G/5G networks.
What is the ROI of a monitoring tool?
The ROI of a monitoring tool is measured on four points: a shorter MTTR, fewer customer service contacts related to digital malfunctions, a better conversion rate on monitored journeys, and less revenue lost to undetected incidents.
