Configuration guide: Browsers - Stability and compliance

Overview

Digital transformation is causing an explosion in the adoption of web business applications, so to ensure that employees' experience of browser-based applications is optimal, it is crucial that they use the correct browsers, and that these are kept up-to-date.

The Browser Stability and Compliance pack addresses these problems with an at-a-glance summary of key metrics with dedicated pages that provide additional actionable insights into performance and stability issues, version dispersion, and non-corporate browser usage.

By maintaining control of installed browser applications, employee adoption and business productivity are improved, and compliance and security risks are reduced.

Pre-requisites

This library pack contains widgets that refer to the collection of page view data of defined web-based applications. An Application Experience license is required for the accurate collection of this information.

Content and Dependencies

Configuration

Remote actions

The following Remote Actions are required. They retrieve browser plugin information required for a dedicated dashboard tab.

• Get Chrome plugins - Retrieves the plugins currently configured for Chrome, in alphabetical order, displaying version and status.

• Get Microsoft Edge plugins - Retrieves all the plugins currently configured for the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, in alphabetical order, displaying version and status.

• Get Firefox plugins - Retrieves all the plugins currently configured for the Firefox, in alphabetical order, displaying version and status.

It is recommended to schedule the mentioned remote actions on a daily basis for all devices to ensure that an accurate correlation with execution crashes can be displayed.

Rule-based custom field

This dashboard is configured to use a rule-based custom field named “Browser compliance type”.
This custom field has two rules by default to categorize browser executables as either:

• Corporate - all browsers certified by the organization to access essential web resources

• Other - all browsers not certified for corporate use for stability or compliance reasons

By default there are four browser applications defined as corporate browsers in the custom field included with this pack; Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. To ensure that this dashboard functions correctly this custom field must be reviewed and configured to your organizational preferences to ensure that the correct browser binaries are assigned to each category.

Applications

Some widgets in this dashboard refer to open browser tabs. An excessive number of open, active tabs can impact the performance of the device and the responsiveness of web-based applications.
This open browser tab information is dependent on Applications, specifically the collection of page view data of defined web-based applications. To define these applications, the following configuration is necessary:

• The Nexthink browser extension must be installed on each browser

• At least one corporate, or commonly-used, application must be configured as a web-based application in the Applications configuration menu. Click here for more information.

• Web page view data will be collected for all defined web-based applications via the browser extension. This includes the average number of open active tabs at the point of collection.

Note: For this data collection to be reliable, an Application Experience license is required for best results. With no license installed, only three web-based applications can be configured, so the open browser tab information collected is unlikely to be as comprehensive.

Dashboard changes

The majority of widgets in the dashboard are based on the rule-based custom field included with this pack. As a result, any changes made to this custom field will be reflected in all widgets that refer to it. The exceptions to this rule concern the widgets in the Versioning, and Plugins tabs.

• Versioning tab - shows multiple breakdowns for four major browsers by default: Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. If any changes are required for this selection of browser applications, for example to replace Firefox with Microsoft Internet Explorer, then these changes will have to be made to each widget manually.

• Plugins tab - shows the results of three remote actions that retrieve plugin information from three popular browser applications: Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. If one of these applications is not in use in your organization, the widgets that refer to it could be deleted.

Usage

To know more about how this dashboard should be used, please refer to the Usage Guide.

Usage guide: Browsers - Stability and compliance