Go beyond uptime. Monitor the digital experience.
SaaS runs the modern workplace. But in your digital workspace, the real challenge isn’t just whether an app is “up”… it’s whether it actually works well for the employee and is even being used!
In 2026, SaaS application monitoring has shifted from the server room to the “last mile” of work: the browser, the home network, the endpoint, and the third-party apps that power productivity.
That’s the real world, and it’s where things silently break. As employees, we’ve all experienced it when a page hangs, Microsoft Teams drops audio, or Zoom spins. Meanwhile, IT dashboards are likely still smiling green.
IT leaders are asking different questions about how to monitor SaaS applications now:
- How do we see SaaS performance for off-network users… on unmanaged devices… using Shadow SaaS apps we don’t even officially approve?
- How do we spot issues before the help desk ticket lands?
- How do we prove SaaS investments are driving adoption and actually improving productivity?
This guide walks through the top SaaS monitoring solutions for 2026 and why blending observability, DEX, remediation, and software reclamation is the only way to close the visibility gap. Let’s see what’s happening out there.
SaaS Monitoring is the Backbone of The Digital Workspace
Today’s SaaS monitoring platforms provide comprehensive insights into application performance, user experience, and potential bottlenecks across browsers, networks, devices, and cloud services. They give IT way more than telemetry; they provide a reality check on what employees actually experience.
For IT directors and digital workspace managers, these tools are indispensable because they help:
- Manage sprawling digital ecosystems
- Uncover Shadow IT before it becomes a risk
- Validate SaaS adoption to see if tools are truly worth the money
- Keep integrations from silently breaking workflows
In short, SaaS app monitoring has evolved. It doesn’t stop at “visibility.” Effective SaaS and web app monitoring in 2026 adds proactive remediation. With AI layered on top, platforms can now:
- Identify “Shadow IT” and “Shadow AI”: Discover unapproved SaaS and AI tools that bypass official procurement to sneak into workflows.
- Optimize License Spend via Reclamation: Track feature-level engagement to “right-size” budgets by reclaiming unused seats.
- Protect UC performance: Monitor the quality of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom in real-time to catch issues before calls implode.
This shift turns monitoring from rear-view analysis into forward-looking prevention.
Why Traditional Monitoring Still Fails SaaS
Most monitoring stops at the data center edge. But modern IT lives far beyond it. Admins now face three unavoidable technical hurdles:
1. The “last-mile” network
Local ISP congestion, home Wi-Fi interference, and bad peering to SaaS CDNs are all invisible to traditional NOCs.
2. Browser-level contention
Heavy JavaScript, misbehaving extensions, and memory churn feel like outages but never appear in backend logs.
3. Shadow SaaS and Shadow AI
Tools that never went through procurement quietly drain resources and increase risk. And when someone reports “Teams keeps freezing,” every traditional monitoring dashboard still shows green, yet productivity is gone.
Put simply: the problem isn’t in your NOC (Network Operations Center dashboards) anymore; it’s in the last mile. The best SaaS monitoring gives leaders the data they’ve been missing and the ability to act on it.
Top SaaS Monitoring & Observability Tools for 2026
Each of the tools currently available in the market specializes in addressing a specific facet of the complex challenge of comprehensive SaaS monitoring, such as performance, security, user experience, and so on. To gain a complete picture of their SaaS environment’s health and performance, organizations often need to combine multiple monitoring tools. Here’s our roundup:
Datadog: Great for Back-End Observability
Datadog stands out as a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform for infrastructure, apps, and DevOps teams. If you’re running containers, Kubernetes, microservices, or complex distributed systems, Datadog gives you deep visibility into metrics, traces, and logs — all in one place.
In other words, it’s built for environments where you own the app, and you need to watch every layer of it.
Where it helps admins:
- strong, unified observability across infrastructure, apps, and logs
- real-time dashboards that make performance issues easier to correlate
- excellent integration library (450+), so it plugs into almost anything
- great for spotting issues caused by deployments, code changes, or scaling problems
Key strength:
Excellent for back-end SaaS monitoring when your organization controls the application code.
2026 update:
Datadog has leaned harder into AI by adding smarter anomaly detection and noise filtering so microservice-heavy environments don’t drown admins in alerts.
Where it can fall short for monitoring SaaS apps:
- Focuses more on servers/services than actual user sessions
- Doesn’t show what happens in the browser (especially off-network)
- Troubleshooting often still requires devs/SREs to jump in
- Not built to explain why Salesforce/Workday/ServiceNow feels slow to users
Bottom line:
Datadog is a powerhouse for complex environments and DevOps teams, and it absolutely has its place in the stack. But if the ticket says: “Salesforce is slow again…” Datadog likely shows everything is healthy because the problem isn’t in the app code. It’s somewhere in the last mile.
SolarWinds: Dependable Network Monitoring Software with Strong Troubleshooting
SolarWinds has long been a staple on the lists of best network monitoring tools, and that reputation still holds. Its Network Performance Monitor (NPM) gives admins solid visibility into routers, switches, firewalls, and WAN paths… basically, everything between the user and the cloud.
If you think the problem lives somewhere on the network, SolarWinds can help you prove (or disprove) it fast.
Where it helps admins:
- Visual maps and path analysis to trace where traffic slows
- Intelligent alerts when network thresholds are exceeded
- Good tools for diagnosing latency, packet loss, and failures
- Familiar workflows that many IT teams already know
Key strength:
Ideal when you need network-level insight and want to see how traffic moves across your environment.
Limitations to keep in mind:
- Doesn’t track performance inside the browser
- No real view of SaaS from the employee’s device
- Doesn’t account for unmanaged or remote endpoints
- Still assumes most issues live on “your” network
Bottom line:
SolarWinds is strong and, in many environments, it’s essential. But when the user is working from home and says, “Everything else works… except this SaaS app,” there’s a good chance SolarWinds won’t show the full story.
Zluri / Zylo: SaaS Management Platforms That Are Good for Spend
Zluri and Zylo live in the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) category. These tools are designed to help IT and finance teams understand what SaaS your organization has, who’s using it, and how much it’s costing — often pulling data from expense systems, procurement records, and usage logs.
They excel at answering questions like:
- “Why did we suddenly get billed for a new subscription?”
- “Who has access to this tool?”
- “Are we paying for seats nobody uses?”
If you’re trying to tame SaaS sprawl or optimize vendor spend, SMPs are a smart investment.
Where it helps admins:
- Shadow SaaS discovery by combining financial records and usage data
- License and renewal tracking to avoid surprise charges
- Ownership, contract, and vendor metadata in one place
- Usage trends that inform renewals and rightsizing decisions
Key strength:
Ideal for governance, cost control, and compliance around SaaS portfolios.
Where it falls short in performance troubleshooting:
- Doesn’t monitor real-time application responsiveness
- No user session data; you won’t see slow page loads or errors
- Doesn’t track latency, browser behavior, or endpoint performance
- Limited value when an employee reports a slow or failed login
Bottom line:
Zluri and Zylo are excellent SaaS inventory and spend tools, especially when shadow subscriptions are out of control or finance teams are pushing back on renewal costs.
But they don’t help you diagnose or fix performance issues. If someone walks up and says, “ServiceNow is lagging again,” you still need a tool that sees the session (not just the contract).
New Relic: Powerful APM with Growing Observability Capabilities
New Relic built its name on application performance monitoring (APM), and it’s still one of the strongest tools in that category. It gives deep insight into application code, database queries, transactions, and backend dependencies.
In 2026, New Relic expanded further into “full-stack observability,” giving teams broader visibility into infrastructure alongside application data.
Where it helps admins (and DevOps especially):
- Detailed tracing to find slow transactions and failing components
- Real-time dashboards that are great during incidents
- AI-powered anomaly detection to surface unusual behavior
- Strong tooling for environments that deploy code frequently
Key strength:
Outstanding for custom application monitoring when performance issues originate in the codebase.
Limitations for SaaS-heavy environments:
- Still primarily designed for developers, not IT service teams
- Not focused on browser-level or endpoint-level visibility
- Doesn’t explain performance issues inside third-party SaaS tools
- Limited value when apps are fully vendor-managed
Bottom line:
If you run apps you build and maintain, New Relic is incredibly valuable. But if your world looks more like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zoom/Teams, and HR/Finance SaaS tools… New Relic won’t tell you why users are suffering, because the issue usually isn’t in the app code at all.
ControlUp: Observability & Remediation For The Hybrid Workplace
While many know ControlUp for its roots in VDI, it has evolved into a full digital employee experience (DEX) platform spanning SaaS, browsers, endpoints, and virtual environments. Think of it as a comprehensive observability and remediation layer for the entire digital workplace, designed for admins who need to fix problems and not just observe them.
ControlUp ONE is the all-in-one DEX platform that makes it all happen, while ControlUp for Apps provides SaaS performance monitoring directly from the user’s perspective. It does so in real time, wherever work happens.
Where it stands out:
- Holistic SaaS visibility: Monitor any web app, whether it runs inside VDI or on a local device (macOS, Windows, Linux). See page load times, errors, and latency from the user’s actual session.
- Shadow IT & Adoption Intelligence: Get a single view of third-party SaaS usage, including apps not behind SSO. Spot risky tools and validate which apps people really use.
- Active Software Reclamation: Go beyond monitoring to action. Identify unused or underutilized licenses and reclaim them automatically to cut wasted spend.
- Root-Cause Isolation Without Guessing: Quickly see if performance issues come from the user’s ISP, a bad browser extension, CPU/RAM contention, or a vendor outage. No more finger-pointing between teams.
- UC Performance Tracking: Track real-time quality metrics for Teams and Zoom across remote and hybrid environments. See jitter, packet loss, and call quality trends, especially for remote workers.
- Proactive Remediation: Use guided actions to move from alerts to automated fixeswhere possible, reducing repeat tickets and mean time-to-resolution (MTTR).
Key strength:
By pinpointing and quickly fixing issues, ControlUp for Apps helps employees remain focused, so productivity is maintained.
Read more about SaaS application monitoring made easy.→
Watch our webinar on-demand to see it in action. →
Limitations to keep in mind:
- ControlUp for Apps is purpose-built for application experience insights, with a deliberately scoped role alongside broader ControlUp offerings.
- While it provides unmatched depth for core workflows across Chrome and Edge on Windows, expanding its “last mile” visibility to a broader range of browsers (Safari, Firefox) and operating systems (macOS, Linux) is in-the-works.
Bottom line:
Unlike tools that stop at the server, ControlUp extends visibility into the browser and the physical endpoint. See everything, troubleshoot faster and better, remediate easier, and reclaim the budget being wasted on unused SaaS.
Quick Comparison: Which tool solves which problem?
| Tool | What It’s Best At | What It Doesn’t Really Solve | Ideal User |
| Datadog | Infrastructure + microservices observability, logs/traces | Off-network user experience, SaaS session visibility | DevOps / SRE / platform teams
|
| SolarWinds | Network paths, latency, and routing issues | Browser performance, unmanaged devices, and hybrid workers | Network admins
|
| Zluri / Zylo | SaaS inventory, renewals, governance, Shadow IT costs | Real-time performance & troubleshooting | IT + finance / procurement
|
| New Relic | Application Performance Monitoring (APM), code-level tracing | Issues inside 3rd-party SaaS tools | Dev & engineering teams
|
| ControlUp | Real user SaaS experience, browser + endpoint visibility, remediation | Deep app code monitoring | IT admins / service desk / digital workspace |
Deep Dive: How ControlUp Solves the “SaaS Visibility Gap”
Modern organizations struggle with a visibility gap: they can see their internal servers, but they are blind to the third-party SaaS experience. ControlUp for Apps closes this by using lightweight browser extensions to capture performance and usage metrics directly from the user’s perspective.
| Feature | Benefit to IT & Digital Workspace Managers |
| Real-Time Health Monitoring | Track Page Load Time and Time to First Byte (TTFB) for any SaaS app. |
| Employee-Centric Dashboards | Visualize user journeys to spot exactly where a session failed or slowed down. |
| Multi-OS Endpoint Visibility | Get the same level of detail on a physical MacBook in a coffee shop as you do on a VDI instance. |
| Privacy-First Design | Built for 2026 regulations (GDPR/CCPA), ensuring monitoring is ethical and employee-focused. |
Here’s the real pain admins feel: “We can see our servers, our network, and our VDI… but we have no clue what’s happening inside SaaS apps from the user side.”
ControlUp for Apps plugs that hole by capturing telemetry directly from the browser, without requiring the app vendor to cooperate.
| What You See | Why It Matters |
| Page load times & TTFB | Quickly confirm whether the issue is real or a user perception |
| Error codes by session | Stop guessing which step fails |
| ISP vs endpoint vs SaaS vendor | No more finger-pointing between teams |
| Cross-OS visibility | Same detail on Mac, Windows, Linux, and VDI |
| Privacy-aware design | Monitors performance — not user content |
Admins finally get something nobody else gives them → evidence. And evidence makes conversations like this a lot easier:
“No, this isn’t our network. The issue is happening inside the vendor’s region.”
Or:
“Yep, it’s your Chrome extension. Disable it.”
Tickets close faster. Triage gets smarter. Stress levels drop!
Strategic Implementation: How to Choose The Right Tool
Features on a comparison sheet are great, but picking a SaaS monitoring platform is ultimately about solving the right problems, in the right order.
Start with these core questions:
✔ Does it actually monitor the last mile and not just the cloud?
If the tool only watches the SaaS provider, you’re blind to the real cause. It should see browser behavior, local network, and endpoint health, not just “vendor status.”
Assess the last mile: Does it monitor the user’s browser and local network — or only the cloud provider?
✔ Is it built for productivity or strictly security?
CASB tools stop Shadow IT. DEX tools ensure the apps employees actually use… actually work.
Define the goal clearly: Security (CASB) vs Productivity/Experience (DEX), they are not the same job.
✔ Does it help you consolidate instead of fragment?
Tool sprawl slows triage. If you need three consoles to troubleshoot a SaaS complaint, you’re already behind.
Consolidate your stack: Prefer platforms that span VDI, physical endpoints, and SaaS visibility in one place.
✔ Can it help fix problems vs just report them?
Monitoring that stops at “we see an issue” and “something’s broken” just dumps tasks on your team. You need to reduce ticket volume without adding more noise and more workload.
Prioritize guided remediation and automation: Choose platforms that turn monitoring into value by providing guided fixes, actionable insights, and automations, on top of alerts and pretty dashboards.
Evaluation Steps: A Practical (and Technical) Playbook
Rolling out SaaS monitoring isn’t a “turn it on and walk away” project. To get real value, your plan must link visibility to outcomes. This is crucial for remote workers, unmanaged devices, and SaaS platforms that you do not control.
Assess Current Infrastructure
Start by mapping where visibility stops today. Look at the network path (including VPN routing), the endpoint, the browser session, and the SaaS provider. If you can’t tell whether an issue is local, network-based, or vendor-side, that’s your monitoring gap.
Define Monitoring Objectives
Set objectives tied to experience, not just uptime: fewer “it’s slow” tickets, faster MTTR, better Teams/Zoom quality, or discovery of Shadow SaaS. Align these with business goals so success is measurable.
Choose the Right Tools
Match tools to architecture. CASB protects against Shadow IT. APM is ideal when you own the code. A network monitoring tool diagnoses routing. DEX/SaaS experience tools monitor the last mile and the user session. Favor platforms that avoid tool sprawl and support both VDI and physical endpoints.
Train and Empower Teams
Make sure service desk and admin teams know how to interpret real-user telemetry. They should recognize if a problem is related to the endpoint, network, or vendor. They also need to know when they can fix issues immediately instead of escalating them.
Continuously Monitor and Optimize
Review performance trends and ticket patterns regularly. Tune alerts, eliminate duplicate tools, and adjust as SaaS usage changes. Monitoring should evolve alongside the business, not remain static.
Final Takeaway
In 2026, the help desk ticket is your most expensive metric. The biggest SaaS failures happen in the “last mile”… within the browser, home Wi-Fi, or during a Teams call.
Traditional infrastructure tools that only monitor the cloud backend are now only half a solution. By failing to account for the user session, they leave IT admins blind to the actual root cause of productivity loss.
ControlUp gives you the missing half. By integrating it into your stack, you move from “it’s broken” to “it’s fixed” (and “it’s paid for correctly”). It transforms raw telemetry into faster troubleshooting, indisputable evidence, and proactive software reclamation.
As the distinction between IT monitoring and workforce productivity vanishes, organizations that thrive will be those that view SaaS observability as a foundational element of the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). Whether your users are on a persistent VDI instance or a local browser, ControlUp ensures their productivity—and your visibility—remains uninterrupted.
Ready to see how your SaaS applications are actually performing?
