Has anyone used Digital Employee Experience (DEX) software?

We got the pitch from NexThink a few weeks back at work. Since then, I've been asked if the business would benefit from it. I got some "nice shiny" vibes from it and can see the upper management liking the dashboard functionality.

From what I can see, it does the following:

• Monitor end user devices (desktop and mobile)
  • The usual infrastructure reporting stuff and it can be customised using WMI, scripts, event logs, etc.
• End user device inventory
  • Vendor, model, drive space, installed applications
• Event based automation
  • Outlook crashes and it prompt to user to log a job with a link
• User notifications
  • As per the previous point
• Reporting
• Pretty visualisations
  • The one I liked most was web application latency across the network

I can see some overlap with SCCM in some of the hardware inventory and in our bespoke reporting tool. Whilst not at feature parity for either item, it provides a central point to tie it all together which is nice.

I was wondering if anyone else here is either using NexThink or something similar and what their impressions are.

 

Just a bump on this one guys. I'm mainly chasing to see if others are using similar software and what other's thoughts are on the idea of monitoring end user devices.

 

looks like Big brother malware to me.

theres conventional ways to ensure your employees arent doing anything illigal on workstations, like net filtering and SRP.

beyond those measures anything more is taking it too far imo.

just an opinion of someone whos spy'd (in an employee/employer fashion) on by a big corporation on a daily basis..

 

DEX isn't employee monitoring, it's monitoring of systems employees use... so when someone says "Outlook has crashed 18 times today" you can look at the dashboard, and see that it hasn't.

I don't see the business value for such tools, unless you have business buy-in to say 'Unless performance is below $benchmark line, we won't investigate user reported "slowness"' but the chances of that happening are slim to none, so you spend the money on the tool, but you're still spending the time dealing with individuals.

 

Yeah, this is what they sell it as. Which is also what we'd be wanting to use it for. The ability to have two weeks of data on a device to say "well, Outlook has crashed and here are the metrics at that time" would be good for L1/2 level troubleshooting and getting correlated data for those really weird issues. I'm not sure that you'd be able to show real value unless you've got the scale to add to the tool. An MSP should be able to derive value from sharing configuration and reporting across multiple contracts. The bundled reports on things like Teams usage and Windows 10 Feature Updates, less relevant as we're able to grab most of that stuff from SCCM. Where I feel it shines is having the agent on the desktop doing event based automation. that would stop little bespoke utilities from being created to handle such things, e.g. when App A runs, do this.

We've had need to create some bespoke utilities, as mentioned above. There's about 40 hours of effort (Dev, Test, Change Mgmt and Deployment) when something like that is needed. We already have our bespoke reporting solution for reporting on log on and start up times, AV updates, etc. The ability to correlate some more data sets for application troubleshooting might be beneficial. But, would the value returned be worth the investment?

 

Had a similar pitch from https://www.lakesidesoftware.com/
Found it challenging to quantify the value of such platforms in addition to existing tools we use (MDM, etc) in conjunction with ServiceDesk reports / trends.

 

If you're going to spend money on reducing wasted troubleshooting time, perhaps consider analysing the whole service stack rather than just the process. For example, Riverbed has a suite starting with Aternity for endpoints and moving up from there.