Monitoring desktop applications

Many critical business applications have a desktop version installed on employee devices, for example, Teams or Office 365. Monitor Desktop Applications to assess and manage digital employee experience (DEX) using desktop versions of the software.

Desktop applications represent binaries grouped with their associated subprocesses. As a result, application-related metrics and AI insights include all subprocesses.

From the chosen desktop application dashboard, view and filter important metrics using:

The Overview tab includes widgets for usage and performance of the desktop application—these widgets draw data from the corresponding Diagnostics dashboard.
The Network tab has a visualization of connection.events data and metrics specific to the desktop application. Refer to the Network view documentation to interpret this visualization.

The Investigate more right-side panel allows you to open filtered investigations to examine data further, or open full Diagnostics dashboards specific to the target application.

Refer to the Monitoring applications documentation to learn about high-level monitoring of web and desktop metrics using the Application Overview page.

Interpreting the usage and performance of desktop applications

From the target desktop application dashboard, explore the widgets under the Overview tab to understand usage and performance:

Employees

The Employees widget displays the number of unique users with execution time > 0 per time bucket.

Crashes per employee - Diagnostics troubleshooting

The Crashes per employee widget displays the average number of crashes per employee using the application in a given time period.

Hover over the integer metric value to reveal the action menu:

Click on the action menu and select Troubleshoot to diagnose issues further.
Examine the corresponding Diagnostic dashboard, loaded on a new page, for the target application crashes.

The open Diagnostic dashboard preserves the selected timeframe; however, the timeframe granularity for the Diagnostic dashboard is 1 day, while on the Desktop application dashboard, it can be much detailed, for example, 1 hour.

Similarly, the Investigate more right-side panel allows you to open full Diagnostics dashboards specific to the target application.

Employees with crashes

The Employees with crashes widget displays the total number of employees who experienced the application crash in a given time period. Use the toggle to switch between the percentage and number values.

Connection establishment time

The Connection establishment time widget displays the average connection establishment time per time bucket. It is equal to the time taken to establish a TCP connection with the 3-way handshake.

Failed connections

The Failed connections widget displays the ratio of failed connections per time bucket. The system computes the ratio by dividing the number of TCP connections that failed by the ones that the devices triggered. Connections might have failed because there was no host, no service or the server rejected them.

The ratio is split among 3 different values:

Rejected connections
No Host connections
No Service connections

Each ratio appears in a different color. Find the legend that explains each color below the widget.

Metric by - table breakdowns

Analyze metric variations by Binary, Operating system, Country or State using the dropdown list.

The system displays Unknown in the results table if the geolocation is not configured properly.

Sort the table by other metrics by clicking on the table headers.
Click on the action menu next to each result to filter the page. Active filters appear at the top in the filtering bar and you can remove them individually or all at once.

The values displayed in this section may vary from those displayed in the widgets above. For example, the system counts an employee who uses different versions of an application several times in this section, but only once in the Employees widget.

The system sorts the results by the Employees column by default. The breakdown by country and state uses the geolocation of devices feature.

Refer to the Configuring geolocation documentation for more information.

Timeframes and time granularity

The time granularity of Desktop Applications is consistent with the timeframe selector you have chosen.

Currently, you can select timeframes for up to the Last 14 days.

When switching from another dashboard where the selected timeframe is different from the one supported by Desktop applications, the system displays a warning message and adjusts the timeframe to Last 48 hours.