& digital resilience
When physical infrastructure fails, digital experience becomes critical.
When severe weather and other natural hazards disrupt power, water or telecommunications services, customers and field teams depend on outage reporting, warning and flood-data APIs, restoration updates and operational applications. Digital experience monitoring helps utilities verify that these critical services still work.
The physical environment is disrupted. The digital service must keep working.
Severe weather can affect infrastructure, access, communications and field operations at the same time, placing digital services under conditions very different from normal day-to-day usage.
When the lines go down, demand goes up
The wind has brought down power lines. Roads are flooded, mobile networks are congested, and repair crews are moving into areas where conditions may still be dangerous. Homes and businesses have lost an essential service, and thousands of people reach for their phones at once.
↑
Customer demand reaches its peak
Customers need outage maps, restoration updates, alerts and reporting services precisely when disruption is at its highest.
↓
Supporting infrastructure is under strain
Traffic increases while networks, systems and field operations may already be dealing with exceptional conditions.
Normal performance does not guarantee emergency performance
An outage map that performs perfectly on an ordinary afternoon may slow down under exceptional traffic.
Available does not always mean usable
An application may be available from the utility's data centre but unusable over a degraded mobile connection.
Successful response does not always mean useful data
An external data service may respond successfully while still supplying outdated information.
Are the systems running?
Infrastructure and application monitoring can confirm whether servers, networks and applications are technically available.
Can users complete the journey?
DEM examines whether customers and employees can actually use critical digital services under the conditions they are facing.
DEM looks at disruption from the user's side.
Instead of asking only whether servers, networks and applications are running, digital experience monitoring asks whether customers and employees can complete the journeys that matter most. During an emergency, that distinction becomes operationally significant.
A service is not truly available during an emergency unless the people depending on it can still use it successfully.
& service continuity
Digital service continuity begins before the outage
Digital service continuity starts before the first customer loses power or water. Weather observations, flood measurements and warning services help public authorities and infrastructure operators understand what is approaching, identify exposed areas and prepare their response.
Critical decisions depend on data moving reliably between systems.
Much of the information used to anticipate and manage an emergency passes between systems through application programming interfaces. APIs connect observations, data services and the digital tools used by authorities, operators and the public.
Users may never see the API, but every downstream service may depend on it.
An API may be almost invisible to the person consulting a map or receiving an alert, but it is an essential link in the information chain.
If it becomes unavailable, responds too slowly or returns incomplete data, every downstream service that depends on it may be affected.
One degraded API can affect multiple services, users and decisions downstream.
Monitoring a vital link in the flood-information chain.
In one French deployment, API monitoring tracks the availability and performance of interfaces providing access to Vigicrues flood data.
These interfaces form part of the information chain through which near-real-time water-level and flow-rate measurements can be displayed and reused by digital information services. API monitoring verifies whether this vital part of the chain remains responsive.
Flood data becomes useful only if the information chain remains responsive.
API monitoring helps verify that each digital link required to expose and reuse near-real-time information continues to respond when conditions are changing quickly.
During prolonged flooding, the information chain operates at national scale.
During winter 2025-2026, France recorded 18 days of red flood warnings, a record since the national flood-warning system was introduced in 2006. At the height of the flooding, alerts were in effect for 174 river sections monitored by Vigicrues across 83 French departments.
& restoration
Monitoring the customer's outage and restoration journeys
During a power outage or other service interruption, receiving confirmation that the utility is aware of the problem is only the beginning. Customers depend on a sequence of digital services throughout the disruption and restoration process.
One outage can generate multiple critical digital journeys.
As an incident develops, customers need more than a simple outage notification. They need current information, working self-service tools and a reliable way to understand what happens next.
The homepage being available is not enough.
Each digital journey must work from beginning to end. Authentication must succeed, the correct account or location must load, underlying APIs must provide current information and the final confirmation must reach the customer.
Synthetic Monitoring + RUM + API Monitoring
No single monitoring approach answers every question. Combining controlled transaction testing, real-user experience data and API monitoring provides a more complete picture of the customer's outage and restoration journey.
Can the journey be completed?
Automatically reproduces critical customer journeys at regular intervals and from relevant locations. It can verify whether customers can report an outage, open a map or retrieve a restoration estimate before failures generate a wave of calls.
What are actual users experiencing?
Shows the experience of real visitors across different devices, browsers, locations and network conditions, revealing errors or delays that controlled testing alone may not expose.
Are the underlying services responding correctly?
Checks the availability, response time and expected output of the services beneath the interface, helping determine whether a data or integration layer is contributing to the disruption.
Monitoring should answer concrete questions during the incident.
Combining synthetic monitoring, RUM and API monitoring helps teams understand whether an issue affects the entire digital service or only a specific population, geography or technical environment.
During an outage, monitoring should verify the complete customer journey from the first interaction to the final confirmation, not simply whether the digital channel is online.
& real-device monitoring
Keeping field applications usable at the operational edge
Customers are only one side of the restoration effort. Field technicians, contact-centre employees and control-room teams depend on digital information to coordinate work, communicate progress and support restoration.
Restoration work depends on digital access in the field.
Technicians may need mobile access to work orders, network information, maps, asset records and changing repair priorities. At the same time, contact-centre and control-room teams need consistent information so that public guidance reflects progress on the ground.
Digital dependencies extend beyond the utility itself.
Wildfires, floods and severe storms can affect power, water and telecommunications simultaneously. Firefighters and other response teams may also rely on mobile communications, mapping and coordination tools while operating in remote or damaged locations.
Earthquakes, landslides and severe space-weather events arise from different physical processes, but create a similar need for reliable digital information.
Applications must work under conditions that office testing may not reproduce.
Field applications may be used on smartphones, ruggedized terminals or other specialized devices, often over intermittent or congested mobile networks and while operational information changes rapidly.
Diverse physical devices
Smartphones, ruggedized terminals and specialist hardware may all behave differently.
Unstable connectivity
Intermittent or congested mobile networks can change how a service behaves in the field.
Rapidly changing information
Work orders, priorities, locations and incident status may change continuously.
Verify the tools people actually use at the operational edge.
Real-device synthetic monitoring extends visibility to the physical devices used in the field. By reproducing representative actions on these devices, it can help reveal problems associated with the application, operating system, peripherals or local network conditions.
& end-to-end evidence
Component availability does not prove service restoration
Physical infrastructure may begin to recover while the digital service remains incomplete. Restoring individual components does not automatically restore the complete customer or employee journey.
The network can recover before the digital experience does.
Lines are repaired, substations are re-energized, water service returns and telecommunications coverage recovers. Yet the digital experience may still contain outdated information, inaccessible journeys or inconsistent data.
Outdated outage map
The physical service is restored but the map still displays obsolete information.
Authentication still fails
Customers cannot access the correct account or restoration status.
Mobile update missing
The latest restoration information does not reach the mobile application.
Contact centre sees different data
Employees and customers may receive conflicting information.
Field application unavailable
Operational tools remain inaccessible even as physical repair progresses.
External dependency degraded
An external API or network provider may still affect the complete service.
Every dashboard can be green.
Internal teams and external providers may each monitor their own component. Every system can appear normal in isolation.
The complete journey can still fail.
Component-level availability cannot prove that the service expected by the customer or employee has actually been restored.
DEM helps teams investigate the complete service using the same evidence.
Digital experience monitoring adds a shared, timestamped end-to-end perspective. It can identify the affected transaction step, location, device or technical dependency, helping the utility and its partners investigate using the same body of evidence.
End-to-end evidence can support service reporting without confusing monitoring data with regulatory certification.
When digital performance affects an internal service objective, contractual commitment or customer-service obligation, shared monitoring evidence can help document what users experienced, when it occurred and which part of the journey was affected.
& service continuity
Digital recovery continues after supply returns
Restoring supply is not necessarily the same as restoring service. Digital recovery is complete only when customers and operational teams can once again rely on the information, applications and journeys they need.
Supply has returned.
Power, water or telecommunications infrastructure has been restored and the physical network is operating again.
Can people use the service again?
Customers and employees need reliable information, working applications and complete digital journeys before service recovery is truly visible end to end.
Recovery looks different depending on who depends on the service.
A complete view of restoration must include customers, operational teams and the wider digital ecosystem supporting the utility.
Reliable information and usable services
Restoration is complete when customers can obtain current information and use the digital services they need.
Working tools where they are needed
Response and recovery applications must remain usable by the teams coordinating and completing restoration work.
Visibility across the complete service
Customer interfaces, APIs, external providers, employee applications and edge devices all contribute to the end-to-end experience.
Monitor critical journeys before, during and after disruption.
Monitoring across the full disruption lifecycle helps utilities understand not only whether physical infrastructure has recovered, but whether the digital service has recovered with it.
Monitor the complete digital journey with Ekara.
The Ekara platform combines synthetic transaction monitoring alongside real-user monitoring and API monitoring to verify critical digital journeys before, during and after disruption.
Test critical journeys continuously
Reproduce key customer and operational transactions automatically to verify that complete journeys remain usable.
Explore synthetic transaction monitoringUnderstand real customer experience
Observe what actual visitors experience across devices, browsers, locations and network conditions.
Explore real-user monitoringValidate the services behind the interface
Monitor availability, response time and expected output across the APIs that support critical information and journeys.
Extend monitoring to real devices at the operational edge.
For applications used on physical devices at the edge, Ekara Pod extends synthetic monitoring to real smartphones, ruggedized mobile terminals and other specialized equipment.
Which customer and operational journeys will be critical during the next major disruption?
Talk to an Ekara expert about monitoring them before disruption puts them under pressure.