Managing Applications

Your Nexthink Lead can identify the scope of applications that require configuration for your organization. Nexthink Leads are best positioned to play a product ambassador role and get application owners appropriately engaged in the process, maximizing the value received from Applications.

Selecting the right applications

Decide which applications to configure first, by identifying:

The most frequently used applications for email, calendar, collaboration tools and information technology service management (ITSM) such as Office 365, Zoom, ServiceNow, and others. Nexthink Leads are familiar with these applications and can configure them without necessarily involving dedicated application owners.
Applications with a high rate of reported incidence and low rate of adoption which also receive a large number of employee complaints.
High-priority applications used for business-critical operations.
VIP-facing applications.
Applications that are deployed as part of digital transformation projects.

To gain further insights:

Organizations that use an application portfolio management system, such as ServiceNow or similar, can find more information about usage, traffic and business criticality to then help in configuring Applications.
Organizations that use a single-sign-on (SSO) tool can view which applications are part of the organization’s portfolio and select them for configuration purposes.
Interview application owners in your organization for more in-depth investigations.

Considerations for web applications

Start adding web applications once you have installed the browser extensions on the first group of devices.
Only web applications accessed by employees can be configured and managed with Nexthink Applications.

Accessing Manage applications

Select Applications from the main menu.
Click on Manage applications in the navigation panel to open the administration page.

The Administration page contains the Applications and Settings tabs:

Applications tab

Use the search option to quickly filter the table.
Click on the application's name in the table to edit its settings.
Hover over an existing application to reveal the action menu on the right side of the table with the View application, Share application, Duplicate application, Export application, and Delete application actions.

Sharing an application allows selected user profiles to view and edit the application in the Applications menu. This setting does not affect data users can access through NQL.

To share applications you must have 'Edit all applications' permissions.

In the top right corner of the page, you can:

Click the Import button to import a new configuration in a JSON file format.
Click the New application button to create a new application to monitor.

Application configurations added through the Nexthink Library module also appear on this page, but you have to update their URL patterns to make them operational.

Settings tab

Collect usage time for web applications

Usage time refers to the time employees spend using a web application. It measures the time when a browser tab is running the application and has the focus. This is the default option and applies to all applications.

Disabling the monitoring of usage time:

Stops data collection at the endpoint.
Removes the Adoption dashboard from all monitored applications.

Browser extension

Customize the messages that employees see when they click on the Nexthink browser extension.

The messages are:

Enable state - message: this is the message an employee sees when they are visiting a site that is monitored by the browser extension.
Disable state - message: this is the message an employee sees when they are visiting a site that is not monitored by the extension.
About - message: this message appears when an employee clicks on the information icon.It contains information about the browser extension and is followed by a list of business web applications that are being monitored.

Configuring applications

The application configuration page contains the following fields:

Application name: enter a unique name up to 256 characters long. Use the standard UTF-8 character set. Note that copying text from other sources might bring unsupported special characters.
Category:
- Standard: default setting for Category.
- Connectivity: use this category for applications that have a strong impact on the Internet connectivity of employees in your organization, such as VPN or ZTNA applications. When you select this category the system highlights the application in the Device View Timeline under Connectivity to make it easier for you to see the correlation between the employee’s connectivity issues and the application. Refer to the Device View documentation for more information.
Application Type: select the application type, Web, Desktop or Network.
- To configure Web and Desktop version of the same application, select checkboxes for both Web and Desktop. This activates the configuration of both application types on the same page:
- Selecting checkbox for the Network application type, disables Web and Desktop configuration. Configure Network application as a standalone one and access separately from the navigation panel. Use a unique name for Network application to easily distinguish it from the other application version, e.g. Zscaler (network):

Depending on the application type, whether it is a web, desktop, hybrid (web & desktop) or network application, you need to provide different information.

Web version configuration

General

Configure a web application by:

Adding URL patterns to monitor.
Selecting whether to collect URLs of the websites employees visit.
Activating soft navigations.
Linking it with an existing campaign.

Refer to the Configuring web applications documentation for more information.

Key Pages

Key pages help identify business-critical points of a web application based on URL patterns. They give insight into which pages the system has loaded, how often, and what their page load time is. Refer to the Key pages documentation for more information.

Transactions

Transactions monitor employee actions or events in a web application, and are application specific. They are important to monitor because it is through these actions that the business value is produced by the application. Refer to the Transactions documentation for more information.

Licenses

Nexthink Applications allows you to track the license usage ratio for web applications, helping you identify cost optimization opportunities and highlight compliance issues. Refer to the Licenses documentation for more information.

Thresholds

Nexthink Applications makes it possible to configure thresholds at the web application level. This feature generates data that is visualized on the Application Overview and Page Loads pages. Refer to the Thresholds documentation for more information.

Desktop version configuration

Enter the exact name of a binary and press Enter. An autocomplete helps you correctly enter the binary name by providing suggestions when you start typing. Select the Make dashboard device centric to change the orientation of the dashboards from employee to device centric.

For the Desktop option, you cannot include the same binary in multiple applications. An error message will appear after you press the Save application button.

Refer to the Configuring desktop applications documentation for more information.

Network version configuration

Configure rules specifying which connection events you wish to associate with the network application. A network rule may consist of an IP address, domain name, or port.

Refer to the Configuring network applications documentation for more information.