With employees depending on web applications every day, you can’t risk being blind to this critical aspect of digital experience. Although technology performance might appear “in the green” from IT’s perspective, how often are employees experiencing application outages or slowdowns you’re not aware of? Are they using that new business critical app you rolled out – or avoiding it because of hidden usability or other problems? How many SaaS application licenses are going unused and wasting precious IT budget?
IT Needs A Clear Picture to Understand Everything About Your Software
Nexthink Application Experience provides global and real-time web application visibility from the employee perspective.
When application problems occur, they are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot – especially for SaaS apps. Is the problem with the app itself, the network, the device, the browser, or something else? Are only a few employees experience the issues, or all employees?
Consider the case of an ERP upgrade. The change is rolled out to a pilot region, but within one day, IT sees a decline in overall employee sentiment. Exploring the data in Nexthink Experience, the EUC team determines the decline is only seen among employees in the pilot region. Drilling down in Application Experience shows that immediately following the ERP upgrade, those employees began experiencing degraded performance with the application. Nexthink further shows that a specific application transaction is the culprit. Filtering on the transaction reveals that only pilot users with older Chrome versions are impacted, while all others are fine. The team determines there is a minimum version of Chrome needed for the ERP upgrade. They then conduct an Engage campaign to inform all ERP users with older Chrome versions that they will need to update Chrome, with a message offering to automatically perform the Chrome upgrade now or remind them in the future.
Visibility Must Be More Than Performance
Nexthink provides comprehensive usage and adoption information. In the example below, we see a Salesforce adoption dashboard showing extensive usage information. Immediately, end-user computing and other IT teams can spot trends in who is using the application and the volume of usage, both in the aggregate and by specific application page and transaction. It is easy to drill into the data and view usage by operating system, browser version, location, and multiple other dimensions. This gives IT and business leaders an early warning system if usage starts trending in the wrong direction and helps to pinpoint which employees might be having issues – where, when, and why.
With Nexthink, this real-time insight is at your fingertips for any application – whether packaged, hybrid, web, or commercial SaaS.
Know how your web applications are being used
Real-time, employee-centric web application visibility
Problems with web applications frequently only affect some employees, making it necessary for IT to explore resources beyond the application itself to identify the cause. As seen in the SAP S/4 HANA – SD example below, Nexthink delivers a real-time view of the performance of every key web page. Views can be categorized by filters like client type, location, browser version, device configuration and more – allowing fine-grained focus on employees with a shared issue.
Complete visibility into web application performance from the employee perspective
In this example, we see that something happened to double the response time of key pages on February 12. The issue appears to be network related and impacting employees in only one location: Lausanne. Guided investigations (upper right) help rapidly focus troubleshooting on precise employee cohorts sharing performance, reliability or adoption problems. In this case, a new VPN client had been deployed for those employees without sufficient testing, causing significant slowdowns. Only by correlating activity and events across application, device, network and other factors can root causes like this be quickly identified. Then automated remediations can resolve the problem using Nexthink Engage and Act. And although this example is a SaaS application, the same capabilities apply equally to custom web applications.
Real-time application transaction performance from the employee perspective
Critical business applications often have individual workflow steps with significant business value. Consider the use of an ERP application such as SAP S/4 HANA for procurement, shipping, or order processing (shown above). If specific transactions are unavailable due to errors, or are performing poorly, this can directly impact employee productivity and the business’s bottom line. With Application Experience, you have the visibility to see exactly what’s happening, where, which employees are affected, and how long the problem has been occurring.
Accelerate application adoption to increase ROI and reduce costs
If you are like most companies today, your business leaders are rolling out ever increasing web and SaaS applications to support digital transformation of the business. But, to obtain maximum value from those applications, your employees must extensively use all of the business critical application features. Application Experience delivers lifecycle insights into how employees are using web and SaaS applications, including which features they are (or are not) using and how those features are performing. For SaaS applications, this deep insight also allows you to close the gap between what is being used and what is actually licensed – you can save money and speed adoption.
For custom web applications, it enables you to improve the features’ usability while the application is being built or piloted, to prevent issues or poor uptake later on. And, in production, it can be used to ensure that critical features are actually being adopted and used as planned.
Detailed, transaction-level usage visibility
With Nexthink, IT gains visibility into the end-to-end experience of all employees using ANY web application to:
- Minimize blame games, tiger-teams, and war-room meetings associated with solving employee web application issues – saving staff time and improving employee experience and productivity.
- Rapidly align web application licensing counts/costs against actual employee needs and usage to optimize licensing spend.
Speed adoption and improve productivity and sentiment by giving IT, EUC and Application Owners shared visibility to actual employee application use and workflow.
To learn more about the Nexthink Experience platform, please contact your account manager or Nexthink partner.
