Cloud security vendor Zscaler has launched three major new Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) innovations that help enterprises monitor and fix performance issues faster, cut issue detection by 98% and resolve issues in minutes to strengthen SLAs and minimize downtime. These enhancements deliver visibility that helps to ensure a seamless Zero Trust experience and optimal productivity for users everywhere. The three areas highlighted as demonstrating innovation involve network intelligence, Zscaler Managed Monitoring, and enterprise-wide visibility into device health and performance.
“ZDX is an end to end performance monitoring solution that complements the company’s Zero Trust network architecture.” said Patrick Chang VP of Product Strategy for the Zscaler ZDX products. “If an end user experience is not good, ZDX solves the issue for you, as it can break down time, and tell you what is wrong.” ZDX helps identify performance issues across different network segments, allowing service desk teams to quickly diagnose problems whether they are related to the user device, the internet connection, or the application itself.
“ZDX is widely used by Zscaler customers to monitor performance issues, as traditional monitoring solutions often fail in Zscaler environments,” Chang said. He highlighted the challenge of tracking end-to-end performance, noting that Zscaler’s security infrastructure makes it difficult to monitor traffic beyond its system.
‘ZDX is widely used because when things go wrong, it shows where the problem is,” Chang said. “A lot of old solutions don’t work any more, and the problem is often with a SaaS application itself. Zscaler is a black box and often gets blamed for things that are the fault of a SaaS application. ZDX provides an end-to-end perspective, allowing customers to identify performance bottlenecks and negotiate better SLAs or compensation with SaaS providers when issues arise.”
Chang discussed ZDX’s new Network Intelligence capabilities. It identifies ISP bottlenecks, enabling organizations to leverage Zscaler Internet Access to reroute traffic to another Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange data centre, ensuring fast connectivity and minimizing disruptions that impact user productivity. By rapidly rerouting around ISP disruptions, organizations can significantly enhance end user productivity and reduce issue resolution times from days to minutes. Chang noted that while products like Thousand Eyes can monitor ISP performance at a single location, the ZDX solution addresses the broader challenge of remote workers accessing the internet from various locations worldwide.
“This is a new capability that looks for ISPs customers can connect to, and analyzes ISP performance,” he said. “Remote workers are often a problem. We solved a major problem here for a large global consultant. Others don’t look at it from the end user device perspective like we do. However, we have ZDX on 50 million devices, we have a strong footprint overall.”
Chang noted that Gartner reports that 70% of organizations struggle with network complexity and lack of end-to-end visibility, hindering digital experience management. IDC estimates that unplanned IT downtime costs $250,000 per hour globally – a staggering reminder that reactive troubleshooting is no longer enough. Network Ops and Service Desk teams face an uphill battle to pinpoint performance bottlenecks— whether it’s from ISP, or intermediate carriers.
ZDX Network Intelligence changes that. Every five minutes, Zscaler Client Connector launches lightweight cloud probes to collect telemetry – latency, packet loss, jitter — along the user’s exact route to the application. Through machine learning, these metrics are baselined and deviations are automatically flagged, giving teams real-time insights into which ISP is having performance issues and why performance degrades. Aggregated views by Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) allow teams to drill into specific intermediaries along traffic paths, and identify which geographic segments correspond to performance bottlenecks. This granular telemetry enables more targeted and efficient troubleshooting.
“Don’t guess which ISPs perform best,” Zscaler wrote in their blog. “By benchmarking and analyzing packet loss and latency across different ISPs, Network Intelligence highlights optimal routing paths. With this data the users can be switched to better-performing data centers (via configuration on the ZIA side) and teams can ensure seamless user experiences./
The second innovation area is ZDX ISP Performance Monitoring Advantage.
Chang explained the unique advantage of ZDX in monitoring ISP performance, highlighting its extensive global device footprint of 50 million devices.
“Unlike other tools that monitor from data centers, ZDX provides end-user device perspective, allowing it to establish accurate baselines for ISP performance and detect anomalies,” he said. Chang shared an example where a consulting company using competing products was surprised by an undetected ISP issue, illustrating ZDX’s superior capability in identifying such problems. Zscaler Managed Monitoring: Monitors critical SaaS and custom web apps 24/7 with multipath insights from global locations, allowing network operations to detect issues proactively, ensure application providers meet SLAs, and reduce disruptions that impact productivity. This allows organizations to hold ISPs accountable, secure compensation, and negotiate better terms.
“ZDX sits inside an end user device to look at performance, and is very useful if you want to proactively monitor an app like Salesforce,” Chang stated. He also described Zscaler’s managed monitoring service, which proactively monitors SaaS applications from multiple global data centre locations. This allows for early detection of issues, such as a Salesforce problem in Toronto, enabling IT teams to address issues before users are affected. The service is fully managed by Zscaler, requiring only that the customer specifies which data centre locations and applications to monitor.
Device health scoring for performance is the third innovation area. Chang explained the concept of device health scoring as part of end-to-end performance monitoring, which helps identify whether device-related issues such as poor Wi-Fi, high CPU usage, or software crashes are causing performance problems when accessing SaaS applications. He emphasized that this approach allows service desks to determine if the issue is with the device, network, Zscaler, or the application itself.
“The device itself could be the cause of the problem, created by something like game playing,” Chang said. “We collect data at the device level to determine if the problem is at the device.”
Each laptop and desktop is continuously benchmarked against a balanced scorecard of hard and soft health indicators: sustained CPU utilization, memory peaks, disk I/O queues, Wi-Fi signal strength (2.4 GHz or 5 GHz), battery wear, blue-screens, and software crashes. Instead of waiting for complaints, IT can instantly view “Bad” devices and fix the worst offenders – often through a driver update, disk cleanup, or memory upgrade.
Chang emphasized that Zscaler channel partners are likely to be pleased with the innovations.
“The channel reaction is likely to be super-excited,” he said. “These are features many customers have been asking for, addressing issues like ‘why is my device slow.’ It further expands our lead over vendors who try to sell into our install base. These features provide better visibility into end-to-end performance, which is beneficial for resellers and managed service providers. As well, adding device level metrics will be able to help partners identify the root cause of many bottlenecks.”
“The market has shifted from fragmented point solutions to unified security and networking platforms designed to meet the demands of a world that is increasingly dynamic, distributed, and AI-first,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “Zscaler is well-positioned in this transition to meet these demands, leveraging its globally distributed, multi-tenant cloud to consolidate functions and deliver end-to-end visibility. By applying AI across its extensive telemetry, Zscaler’s new ZDX innovations further accelerate issue resolution while enhancing user experience – outcomes that isolated tools cannot achieve.”