Content delivery network provider Cloudflare Inc. today launched two significant updates, Digital Experience Monitoring and Fleet Status, to help customers understand end-user connectivity and performance.

Digital Experience Monitoring, or DEX, is being offered as part of Cloudflare’s secure access service edge solution, Cloudflare One. DEX provides close monitoring and measurement of the internet experience of employees in terms of performance, reliability and speed.

DEX seeks to address the challenge of maintaining consistent performance and reliability across diverse, globally distributed teams in the era of remote work. Cloudflare argues that traditional network performance monitoring tools often fall short in providing actionable, real-time insights into the digital experiences of each team member, particularly when team members connect to various applications from different locations.

With organizations increasingly relying on cloud-based solutions for their daily operations, Cloudflare claims that ensuring the consistent performance of these resources has become a complex task. DEX seeks to address this issue by leveraging “Synthetic Application Monitoring,” a feature that, in the words of Cloudflare, “shines a light through this maze.”

The Synthetic Application Monitoring feature allows scheduled HTTP GET tests to monitor the performance of key applications. The tests are run from multiple points within Cloudflare’s network to provide a true reflection of user experiences.

With DEX, administrators can track response time averages from different locations, providing a realistic assessment of an application’s performance as experienced by their distributed workforce. DEX includes a time series format that easily identifies trends, peak periods and potential issues, transforming raw data into actionable intelligence for network optimization. Users can also use DEX to visualize HTTP status codes over time to detect and troubleshoot potential issues that impact the user experience.

The other announcement, Fleet Status, is a monitoring tool that provides network administrators with real-time insights into the status of all client devices. The tool enables a deep understanding of connection patterns, modes and locations on a global and per-device basis.

Fleet Status utilizes Cloudflare’s WARP client, a solution designed to protect corporate devices by securely routing their traffic through Cloudflare’s global network for advanced web filtering and zero-trust policy enforcement.

The new service is said to go beyond mere data representation by presenting a clear, real-time snapshot of network deployment, highlighting anomalies swiftly and effectively. Fleet Status includes data visualizations, detailed per-device views and time-series charts to turn raw data into actionable insights.

Both DEX and Fleet Status are now available in open beta test mode for all Cloudflare One customers.

Image: Cloudflare