Ratings management

Identifying if a certain value of a device property is good, bad or somewhere in between requires expert knowledge and experience. Ratings allows you to add a classification or ranking to the property of a device. It reduces the complexity of low-level analytics to a single enumerated value that has business significance.

For example, instead of dealing with many possible values of hardware memory, you can gain instant insight into the memory status of a device with the help of a rating. The rating depends on the value of the device property and is based on its comparative assessment, allowing you to immediately understand the health of the device. You can view the ratings in the Device View Checklist tab and use them in NQL queries.

Accessing Ratings

• Click on Administration in the main menu.

• Select Ratings from the Content Management section of the navigation panel to access the Ratings Administration page.

Managing Ratings

• Select Administration from the main menu.

• Click on Ratings in the navigation panel.

• Hover over an existing rating to reveal the action menu.

Ratings table

The table is organized by:

• Name: The name of the rating.

• Origin: An indication of where the ratings originate from.

• Tags: Displays the list of tags assigned to each rating.

• Last modified: The most recent date and time when a rating was changed or edited.

• Search field: A field that filters the table by searching for the name of a rating.

Built-in ratings

Library ratings

Nexthink offers a variety of ratings that can be installed from the Nexthink Library. These are based on actual use cases and preconfigured for immediate use without further customization.

System ratings

Nexthink offers a set of pre-configured ratings based on DEX Score thresholds. You can edit these to better suit your needs or leave the values as default.

Refer to the Configuring the Score metrics tab documentation for more information on configuring ratings, and the List of hard metrics and thresholds documentation for a series of tables depicting DEX Score thresholds. The table below displays supported ratings.

Custom ratings

Custom ratings allow you to define thresholds based on your needs, with the flexibility of including or excluding any relevant data.

Nexthink recommends editing system ratings or downloading library ratings before creating your own to learn their functionality, as well as understanding NQL and how it works. Refer to the Nexthink Query Language (NQL) documentation for more information.

Action menu

Select a relevant rating and click over the action menu on the right side of the table to view:

• Edit: Edit a selected rating.

• Edit tags: Create, assign, and edit rating tags.

• Export: Export a rating to a JSON file.

• Delete: Remove a rating from the system.

Tagging ratings

Create and associate tags with ratings to filter the ratings table results quickly.

Creating and assigning tags

To add tags to a rating:

1. Select Admistration > Ratings.

2. Select a relevant rating and hover over the action menu on the right side.

3. Click on the action menu icon and select Edit tags to open the Tags pop-up.

4. Enter a new name or search for the tag name in the Tags field.

5. Click on the tag action menu to change the tag color or remove the tag.

1. Click Save to add the tag to the rating.

Filtering with tags

1. Click the tags icon on the right-side of the menu to open the Tags panel.

2. Search for a specific tag at the top of the panel.

3. Select one or more tags to filter the ratings table.

Defining a rating

Apply a rating on the following device field

Use the drop-down menu to choose the device field on which to apply the rating. Note that once you save the rating, you cannot change the device field.

Rating definition

Write NQL queries for the system to evaluate the rating. The system executes the queries in the order of poor, average and good, and determines the rating value based on the first query that returns the device as part of the result set.

NQL considerations

There are some considerations you must take into account when writing queries for ratings:

• The query must target the devices collection.

• The query must have at least one where clause.

• The where clause can have the field on which the rating is being applied and standard device properties only (i.e., no additional custom fields or remote action outputs)."

• The with, include, summarize, compute and list clauses are not allowed.

• Time selections such as during past, from and to are not allowed.

• Aggregations, for example, avg(), are not allowed.

• The rating definition for a field is unique and there cannot be more than one rating definition for the same field.

• If an object does not meet the conditions of any rating value, its rating value is then defined as Unspecified.

• If you leave the query for a rating value empty, the rating value is never used since no object matches the query.

Use cases

Rate the output values from the last successful execution of a remote action to collect important information and make further decisions related to the IT environment in your organization.

• From the drop-down menu, select Remote Action - Output, then select the remote action and the output field of the remote action for which you intend to create the rating.

• Access the ratings in the Device View checklists tab and use them in the NQL queries.

Create a rating for the Hardware total RAM property on a device to help Support troubleshoot an employee’s slow PC. Support can:

• View that the Hardware total RAM value has been rated as poor.

• Identify the issue as a possible cause for the slowdowns.

• Recommend a hardware upgrade.

Example NQL queries for ratings

Poor

devices | where hardware.memory <= 8GB

Average

devices | where hardware.memory > 8GB and hardware.memory < 16GB

Good

devices | where hardware.memory >= 16GB

Permissions

To enable proper permissions for Ratings:

• Select Administration from the main menu.

• Click on Roles from the navigation panel.

• Click on the New Role button to create a new role, or edit an existing role by hovering over it and clicking on the edit icon to change the role configuration.

• In the Permissions section, scroll down to the Administration section and enable Manage all ratings.

Refer to the Roles documentation for a detailed description of the permission options.