Scenarios for remote actions in Finder (classic)

Nexthink Finder is a Windows-only desktop application whose functionality is now available within the Nexthink web interface. Nexthink can now be used directly from a browser and most functions no longer require an additional desktop application.

The Nexthink Remote Actions lets you execute remote actions on employee devices. Remote actions provide a number of possibilities for the prevention and remediation of issues encountered by employees, as well as for gathering additional information from devices. A remote action is basically an executable script that can accept parameters and optionally return outputs to be stored in the data layer.

Depending on the purpose of a remote action and how it is triggered, Nexthink has identified four main scenarios or use cases:

• Assisted service

• Self-help

• Self-healing

• On-demand data

In addition, the Remote Actions exposes an API to programmatically launch remote actions, extending their availability to third-party products, such as self-service portals or ticketing systems. Refer to Triggering Remote Actions Via Their API documentation for more information.

Assisted Service

In the assisted service scenario, the goal is to help support teams provide assistance to employees.

When support agents with access to the Nexthink web interface receive an incident or detect an issue on a device, they may manually trigger an appropriate remote action to fix the issue.

Support agents may trigger remote actions from:

• The list of results of an investigation on devices or a category on devices.

  • Context menu on selected devices.

• The Device view.

  • Context menu on the selected device.

  • Links to remote actions in the documentation of score tabs.

Administrators control who can trigger the remote actions by assigning them to roles. Only those Finder users who have the right to edit remote actions or who have a remote action included in the roles of their profile can manually trigger the execution of a remote action.

Self-help

In the self-help scenario, the goal is to help employees solve issues by themselves without necessarily requiring external intervention from support.

The self-help scenario requires the activation of the Nexthink Campaigns, as it relies on campaigns to notify the employees about the issues found and ask them to take action.

Define remote actions for self-help to be automatically triggered when a known issue is detected on the device of the employee. Once triggered, the remote action is connected to a campaign that guides the employee to the resolution of the issue. The remote action should take into account the responses of the employees and act accordingly.

Depending on whether the script payload of a remote action requires administrative privileges or not, run the remote action for self-help:

• In the context of the current active user, if the action requires no special privileges.

• In the context of the local system account, if the action requires administrative privileges.

Refer to Example of self-help scenario in Finder (classic) for more information.

Self-healing

In the self-healing scenario, the goal is to fully automate the remediation of specific issues on the devices of employees while avoiding human intervention.

Define remote actions for self-healing to be automatically triggered when a known issue is detected on a device and execute a remediation script that does not need the interaction of the employee. Carefully consider the frequency of execution of these kinds of remote actions.

Refer to Example of self-healing scenario in Finder (classic) for more information.

On-demand data

In the on-demand data scenario, the goal is to get additional data from devices and incorporate it into Nexthink.

Remote actions are scheduled to be periodically executed on the devices of interest to gather the additional information that Nexthink does not collect by default.

Refer to Executing remote actions in Finder (classic) for more information.