published
November 7, 2022
The complexity of the digital workplace at the enterprise level requires IT teams to gain visibility into every digital asset, across all physical and cloud environments. This is the key to better application monitoring, enterprise security and business advancement, yet IT teams still struggle to achieve this. So long as they lack this complete visibility, the goal of continuous integration and development will remain elusive. And a key component of this process is understanding the experience of the end user.
End users expect their experiences at work as an employee to be as seamless as they are as a consumer. For IT, this means that you can have everything working perfectly – operating systems, applications, networks, etc. – but if you can’t deliver a seamless tech experience to employees, you’ve failed them.
Unfortunately, many of the issues you face come down to a lack of visibility. But fortunately, Nexthink is capable of removing those barriers and bringing unparalleled access to real-time problem-solving. Let’s cover key visibility challenges for enterprise IT and go over how Nexthink can help smooth them out by providing unparalleled real time insights required to address the 7 pillars of DEX Visibility.
1) Employee’s Point of View
Understand the experience employees have with their digital workplace assets from their POV.
The direction from which we approach a problem can make all the difference.
Many Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions approach user problems via synthetic monitoring, a process which runs tests in controlled and predictable environments to give you the closest scenario of what the technology thinks may happen. But this approach distorts IT’s the ability to understand what is happening in real-time and how that impacts the employee. In short, close enough isn’t good enough in today’s hyper-competitive business world.
Nexthink, however, leverages Real-time Alerting, a performance monitoring process which captures and analyses all digital activities on the endpoints as the users interact with them. This way IT can know exactly what and why certain problems occur from the employee’s POV.
For example, let’s imagine you have several users that cannot connect to MS Teams. The problem could be caused by multiple issues like an unstable Teams version, faulty VPN configuration, or an SCCM agent that is crashing.
If IT used a standard APM tool, they’d only have access to application performance data and little else. They’d miss out on critical components like PC performance, resource utilization from the endpoint, application stability, and network speed and configuration data, all of which offer more context about what the user was truly experiencing at the time an issue first begins. Without this data, it could take you a long time to discover the root cause of the issue – if you even can.
Using Nexthink, IT teams can see what employees are experiencing with their digital assets.
2) Endpoint Deep
Visibility into the frequency and timeline of all digital activities on the endpoint
Visibility into the employee POV needs to be deep to see what’s truly happening on the endpoint and beyond.
But there’s much more to simply identifying an initial problem from the user’s POV. Is there something wrong with the employee’s device, or the network or the applications they consume? Are there other problems apart from what has been reported by the user?
Nexthink’s patented lightweight agent continuously monitors and reports all digital activities and properties (like network connections, program executions, web requests, etc.) from the employee device.
The data collected in the Nexthink Infinity platform is presented in a clear, intuitive view for IT to quickly spot-check the frequency and timeline of issues, as well as investigate in detail single problem areas.
For example, just by looking at the below device timeline view for a user, you’ll see that the Teams application was experiencing stability issues (crash) as the user was experiencing poor MS Teams call quality.
Nexthink Device view provides IT with insights into all digital activities and properties from the employee device.
3) Enterprise-Wide
Visibility to correlate what was seen on one device across the entire enterprise
It is not enough to have deep visibility into only one device. You can’t fix, what you can’t see. You need insight across the entire enterprise.
For this, IT Teams need visibility that not only provides deep insights into a single device but also insights that are wide enough to understand what’s truly happening within the environment. How many employees are truly experiencing the issue? And better yet, what components of your digital workplace are impacted?
Nexthink provides enterprise-wide visibility to IT teams, empowering them to oversee the whole enterprise, without any blind spots. IT Teams can diagnose and resolve issues for not only one user, but all the users impacted with the same issue with a single click.
For example, continuing the Teams call quality problem as observed in the previous section, with a single-click, IT is now able to retrieve all the other users experiencing stability issues with Teams.
NQL Query to retrieve all devices experiencing Teams Application stability issues:
Nexthink investigations and native search empowers IT to retrieve enterprise-wide insights with just a click.
Nexthink further revolutionizes enterprise-wide troubleshooting with AI-powered visualizations called Diagnostic View. This feature provides a frequency and timeline of issues, and expandable information of who has been affected across the entire business and why.
Nexthink Diagnostic view provides a timeline and frequency catalogue of all issues, along with other expandable information for further analysis.
4) Relationships
Visibility to understand the way each digital components behave with each other
Being able to articulate the relationships between each component can give IT a series advantage when it comes to incident reduction and DEX management.
When employees connect their endpoints to the network, it’s a no-brainer that those endpoints cease to exist as a stand-alone entities. Instead, they become part of a larger collection of components in a connected, interrelated network. This interconnection opens up a critical opportunity for IT visibility: relationships.
The ability to access and understand the relationships between each digital component within the digital enterprise can equip IT with a tremendous advantage: you’ll be able to articulate how each endpoint interacts with other endpoints and vice-versa; how any given problem impacts a single user and the rest of the network; and how the problem propagates (how quickly) within an environment.
This unique capability makes Nexthink insights invaluable for IT because they can now triage from one end of the digital workplace spectrum to another without hitting an investigative dead-end.
Continuing with the same example, because of the relationships built by Nexthink between all the digital components, IT can now retrieve with a single click, any information which would assist in debugging the issue further.
Nexthink provides drill-down capabilities to make the investigative trail easier to follow.
5) Employee Context
Visibility into the exact situation in which the digital event happened
With the right context about when an event occurs, IT can quickly assess whether they need to isolate one variable or intervene across several.
Context is another key piece that allows IT to understand all things that were happening on an identified device as well as externally when an issue occurs. This way, IT can identify patterns faster and pick and choose when to fix only the impacted assets in question.
Let’s take the same example from above. Nexthink equips IT with automated correlations to quickly understand which variable(s) are impacting the poor stability with MS Teams. In a single click, IT can retrieve all devices experiencing the same stability issues due to a non-compliant version of Teams. This task would have otherwise taken forever to identify.
The Diagnostic view provides AI-powered correlations for quick insights into events like an application crash.
This discovery unlocks what’s happening on the technical side, but there are two final critical pieces we’re forgetting about related to employee sentiment.
6) Employee Perception
Visibility to accurately assess what employees feel about their technology.
Sometimes how employees perceive their tech environments can be different from how they interact with them. Understand the nuances in user perception versus reality with Nexthink.
Employees are the most critical spoke in the digital workplace wheel. Unfortunately, they’re also the hardest component to predict and understand, especially for IT teams that support hybrid and remote workers.
Nexthink offers direct-to-device, one-click surveys that employees can engage with and share invaluable perception data about their technology environments.
Capture the pulse of employees with NPS-style feedback campaigns.
7) Employee Feedback
Visibility to understand what employees say about their digital experience
Traditional email and html-based survey tools fail to garner significant response rates and feedback data – data that could help IT determine whether they’re truly making an impact or not. Those tools also lack context, meaning employees often receive surveys after the fact, when they’ve already moved on to a new tool or IT service.
Nexthink Engage, a two-way communication tool, cuts through the digital workplace noise with attention-grabbing notifications to get your employees to respond. Instead of painstakingly handling one ticket at a time or chasing down employees who never submit one, Engage lets IT deploy (manually and automatically) onscreen messages as soon as an incident occurs. One pharmaceutical company, for example, used Engage and saw their employee response rates increase from 3% to over 70% in just one week!
Nexthink Engage helps IT make employees the key stakeholder in their decisions.
Thus, Nexthink addresses all challenges regarding enterprise visibility issues through one integrated platform, which enables IT to orchestrate enterprise IT services.
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Do you need help unlocking end-to-end visibility? Request a demo today.
