Monitoring desktop applications

Many critical business applications have a desktop version installed on employee devices, for example, Teams or Office 365. With Desktop Applications, better assess and manage digital employee experience (DEX) using desktop versions of the software, proactively troubleshoot potential issues and optimize software adoption and employee sentiment.

Desktop Applications allows you to:

Configure desktop applications with binaries.
Access out-of-the-box dashboards for usage and performance of desktop applications.
- Spot application issues and investigate them further.
- Use the Desktop tab > Network tab to troubleshoot network-related issues specific to desktop applications. See Monitoring Desktop Applications on this page.
- Get qualitative data on employee sentiment.
Set up hybrid monitoring of web and desktop versions and manage them from one familiar user interface.

Configuring desktop applications

Refer to the Manage Applications documentation to learn how to configure desktop applications in Nexthink web interface.

Monitoring desktop applications

From the chosen application page, open the Desktop tab to view and filter important metrics specific to a desktop application:

The Overview tab includes dashboards for usage and performance of the desktop application.
The Network tab has a network view visualization of connection.events data and metrics specific to the desktop application.

The Investigate and diagnose button, highlighted in blue on the right-side panel of the web interface, allows you to open filtered investigations to examine data further.

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

Find below the widgets on the Desktop tab > Overview tab of the chosen application page:

Employees

Displays the number of unique users with execution time > 0 per time bucket.

Crashes per employee

Displays the average number of crashes per employee using the application in a given time period.

Employees with crashes

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

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

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 breakdowns

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

Troubleshooting crashes in Diagnostics

Hover over Crashes per employee widget value to reveal the action menu. Click on the action menu and select Troubleshoot to diagnose issues further:

The Diagnostic page opens in a new window for application crashes.
It preserves the timeframe you selected on the Desktop page. However, the timeframe granularity in the Diagnostic dashboard is 1 day while on the Desktop page it can be much higher, for example, 1 hour.
The diagnostics show results for the binaries configured for the application.

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.

Side panel

Open the right-side panel in the chosen application page by clicking Investigate and diagnose button highlighted in blue in the Nexthink web interface. The side panel includes:

Investigate more

Troubleshoot applications by retrieving data about impacted employees, devices, connection establishment time, memory usage and other metrics using Nexthink Query Language (NQL). The system redirects you to the Investigations page where it automatically writes NQL queries based on the filters you have selected on the Desktop page.

Documentation

In-product documentation helps you find information about the widgets and features you see directly in the product. Additionally, it links to references in the online documentation and Nexthink Learn.