What Is a Monitoring Tool? Definition, Types, and Selection Criteria (2026)

In an environment where digital experiences have become critical assets for businesses, even the slightest issue can have a direct impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, and reputation. A monitoring tool allows you to continuously monitor 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. There are significant differences between traditional IT infrastructure monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), which focuses on the actual user experience. This guide breaks it all down.

💡 Looking for a solution? This article explains how IT monitoring works. If you’d like to explore our solution right away, visit our page dedicated to IT monitoring →

Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, DEM: What Are the Differences?

Before choosing a monitoring tool, it is essential to understand the three main approaches to monitoring and how they complement each other:

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.

1 – Definition of a monitoring tool

Web application monitoring, also known as 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.

2 – Characteristics and Benefits of IT Monitoring

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).

3 – What are the key benefits of monitoring?

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.

IT system security is enhanced through monitoring, which detects failures in key security systems at an early stage. It highlights spikes in activity or unusual workloads.

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.

The statistics that make investing in a monitoring tool worthwhile

Undetected digital failures have a direct and measurable cost. Here are the key industry figures:

An issue that goes undetected for 30 minutes on a critical path can result in tens of thousands of euros in losses. Proactive monitoring—and more specifically, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)—allows you to detect these anomalies before your users do.

4 – Monitoring: the cornerstone of effective IT outsourcing

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.
• Backups are performed daily.
• 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 →

5 – A Closer Look at a Monitoring Solution for Your Website or Mobile App

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 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 2Be-FFICIENT 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).

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Frequently Asked Questions About Monitoring Tools

What is the difference between a monitoring tool and an APM tool?

APM tools monitor internal technical performance: code, infrastructure, and servers. A DEM-focused monitoring tool tracks users’ actual experience along their critical paths. The two approaches are complementary: APM identifies technical causes, while DEM measures the actual impact on users.

How do you choose the right monitoring tool for your business?

The choice depends on your specific use case. To monitor your IT infrastructure, choose a network monitoring tool. To monitor the performance of your applications from the user’s perspective (payment tunnel, login, forms), choose a synthetic monitoring tool focused on the digital experience. For large enterprises with critical workflows (banking, e-commerce, insurance), DEM is the most suitable solution.

What is synthetic monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring involves automatically simulating user journeys at regular intervals from outside your infrastructure, 24/7. Bots replicate the actions of a real user (logging in, adding items to the cart, checking out, subscribing, etc.) and detect issues before your actual customers encounter them.

Does a monitoring tool require installation on the infrastructure?

No, in the case of external synthetic monitoring. The monitoring systems are located outside your infrastructure—no changes to your IT systems are required, no agents need to be installed, and there is no impact on production. Deployment is fast and non-intrusive.

What are the key KPIs to track using a monitoring tool?

The key KPIs are: uptime, average response time, MTTR (Mean Time To Repair), and the success rate of critical workflows. For user-experience-focused monitoring, add: the error rate at critical stages (authentication, payment, subscription) and the correlation between detected incidents and conversion rates.

Can the monitoring tool monitor iOS and Android mobile apps?

Yes. Advanced synthetic monitoring solutions track user journeys on actual physical mobile devices (not emulators), across all browsers and operating systems. They detect mobile-specific anomalies that are not visible in desktop tests, such as SMS authentication, push notifications, and performance on 4G/5G networks.

What is the ROI of a monitoring tool?

ROI is measured by: a reduction in MTTR, a decrease in customer service inquiries related to digital malfunctions, an increase in conversion rates on monitored customer journeys, and a reduction in revenue losses due to undetected incidents.