Digital End-user Experience (DEX) FAQ

[Christopher Ell]

Digital End-user Experience (DEX)
FAQ

Below you will find a list of common questions about Digital End-user Experience (DEX) that should give you a deeper understanding of the solution, how it is setup, and its capabilities. If you need more context for the questions, watching demos and capabilities for DEX on our YouTube playlist is a great start!

What is DEX? 

Q. What is the Digital Employee Experience tools market?

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools can provide a deeper understanding of employees’ experiences with digital technologies and enable digital workplace teams to build an approach focused on employees’ individual preferences.

Q. What is the ServiceNow Digital End-user Experience Product?

ServiceNow® Digital End-user Experience (DEX) is a product leveraging the Agent Client Collector (ACC-VC) that IT deploys on end-user devices to monitor applications, networks, and devices to detect issues before they cause downtime or impact employee productivity.

DEX also provides a Desktop Assistant to provide employees with self-service options like local diagnostics, remedial actions and that makes it easy to connect to Employee Center and Virtual Agent for additional help. The Desktop Assistant can also serve as a notification channel.

Note that we deliberately use the same acronym (DEX) for our Digital End-user Experience product as the industry uses for the Digital Employee Experience market. We use ‘End-user’ because ServiceNow has a much broader set of offerings from Employee Workflows that cover the employee experience such as HR Service Delivery.

Q. Is it intended for DEX to log an incident?

The intent of DEX is to proactively detect experience issues and remediate them before they negatively impact employees. DEX collects usage and performance data from endpoints. Using Metric Rules, DEX detects experience issues and can automatically remediate them, and proactively engage with the employee.

Q. Is ServiceNow Digital End-User Experience (DEX) an alternative to other self-help and self-healing tools that are out there?

Yes, the ServiceNow DEX offering is positioned as a competing product to Nexthink, Lakeside Systrac, 1E and other DEX tools on the market.

DEX Use Case Questions

Q. Can you automate software installation and uninstalls with DEX?

No. However we do have an integration with JAMF for example where we can setup an action to call a JAMF policy to install/re-install faulty software. In coming releases we will be adding similar capability for windows devices as well leveraging tools such as Intune and MECM.

Q. Can a screen capture be done using DEX to do troubleshooting/debugging?

No but Dex can leverage integration with ScreenMeet where you can utilize some remote-control capabilities.

Q. What capabilities are there for event management?

Event Management helps identify health issues across the datacenter on a single management console. It provides alert aggregation and root cause analysis (RCA) for discovered services, application services, and automated alert groups. Event Management generates alerts, applies alert management rules, and prioritizes alerts for remediation and RCA. View this information on dashboards, the alert list in Alert Intelligence, or from a service map.

Q. Does ServiceNow monitor the event log? If not, is it on the roadmap?

ServiceNow DEX does not monitor the event log, however Event Management, as referenced above, has a solution to alert events and can be combined with DEX.

For Windows and Mac devices DEX does provide an events timeline that shows incidents, alerts, changes and some other data associated with that device for streamlined troubleshooting.

Q. What metrics does DEX collect and detect?
For a complete list of Metrics monitored by DEX, please visit the community article HERE or visit our product doc site for check definitions for Windows and Mac devices.

Q. Does DEX have event driven self-healing automation?

No. Currently DEX has alert driven Proactive Engagement. These alerts can also be leveraged by the Event Management solution when drops in performance are detected and remediation /alerts are suggested.

Q. Does DEX support License Metering?

ServiceNow SAM leads License Monitoring for ServiceNow. DEX provides enhanced device data (user, location, OS, performance, battery health, etc) to SAM tables to enrich the SAM solution.

Q. How can a support desk agent access a computer’s history (as reported by DEX) from an open incident page?

In the Investigation tab agents can view device metrics such as running processes, CPU, disk and memory utilization and more. Incidents also have a “related records” tab where Task SLAs, Impacted Services/CIs, Child Incidents, etc. are included. They will also have access to past actions taken by users that received proactive engagement. Agents with access to the DEX overview can access the computer metrics through the device list.

Q. Does DEX provide an out-of-the-box library of scripts or remediations?

Yes, we have pre-installed actions for a device in the DEX Action Library; Clear application cache, clear browsing cache, clear DNS cache, end process, perform disk cleanup and restart device. We are creating more actions each release, but customers can also create their own custom remedial actions from check definitions. Please visit our product documentation site to learn more HERE.

Q. Can ServiceNow DEX have adjustable views and functionality based on role-based access control?

Yes, the out-of-box roles for DEX are DEX Admin, DEX Engineer, DEX User, and DEX Service Desk Agent. Customers can create their own groups with these roles and/or create custom roles and groups.

Q. Does DEX offer capabilities to show device power consumption data?

Yes, the DEX Device page provides access to real-time metrics like battery and energy consumption for insights into system resource utilization, performance, and improvement areas. With DEX's ESG integration, these metrics can be leveraged by ServiceNow's ESG tool to track device CO2 emissions.

Q. How many devices can ServiceNow DEX monitor at once? 

As of the Zurich release, DEX can monitor up to 400k devices. 

Setup Questions

Q. Which versions of ServiceNow will have the capability to use DEX?

Starting with Vancouver P6, and Washington.

Q. Who is entitled to DEX and what capabilities come with entitlement? 

DEX is a stand-alone application and can be purchased from the ServiceNow Store. To take full advantage of DEX functionality and visualize the data you’re collecting you must first be entitled to some version of ITSM (Standard, Pro or Enterprise) as DEX lives on the Service Operations Workspace (SOW). DEX contains Application & Device Health, Desktop Assistant, DEX Content Playbook. Use cases involving Virtual Agent and Now Assist may require additional entitlements.

Q. I am a global organization, is this available outside of the US and for other languages? 

Yes, DEX is available globally in our ServiceNow Cloud and supports internationalization.

DEX is also IL4 certified so it has GCC support for regulated customers within the United States. DEX can not yet support customers in regulated markets outside the United States. DEX also does not support MSP customers.

Q. Is there a DEX demo video?

Yes! You can view the DEX demo video HERE. You can also see the full DEX YouTube Playlist, which has walkthroughs and demos of all the major DEX features released since Xanadu HERE. We updated this playlist every quarter so keep it bookmarked!

Q. What type of devices can be monitored and supported by DEX?

DEX supports laptops running at least Windows (W10 Enterprise; W11 Pro& Ent.) or MacOS (Monterey, Venture, Sonoma), as well as persistent VDIs. For Desktop Assistant, the minimum OS requirement is Ventura 13 and Sonoma 14.

Q. If you have already deployed ACC agent for SAM Pro, how much more do you need to deploy for DEX?

DEX leverages a different ACC (ACC-VC) but if you already have a mid-less ACC installed, you can use that to collect DEX metrics from the end-user device. Please view the article HERE to learn more about DEX and ACC.

Q. Are devices monitored part of the CMDB?

Installing the ACC on the endpoints will populate the CMDB Computer_CI table. If the endpoints are already in the Computer_CI table, DEX ACC will update those CI and become the source of truth with the OS version and device configurations' latest details.

Q. Has ServiceNow deployed DEX internally?

Yes! ServiceNow’s internal Desktop Technology team is Customer Zero for our latest innovations and DEX has been widely deployed in production at ServiceNow.

Q. As long as a device is registered to a user, can it be managed?

Yes, once the ACC is installed and the device is mapped to the user, DEX can start collecting usage and performance data.

Q. Can I control/ restrict which data are collected?

It is currently possible to a deactivate a DEX check definition, which will stop collection of all fields within that check definition. It is not currently possible to edit a DEX check definition to include only certain fields.

Q. Is it possible to restrict who has access by perhaps a user group or location level?

Yes. Access is controlled by the ServiceNow platform Role Based Access Control system (RBAC). By assigning relevant DEX roles to the appropriate Assignment Groups, users will have specific levels of access to DEX data. Read more about roles installed with DEX HERE.

Q. Are there proactive push notifications/pop-ups to the end-user device available in the latest release?

The Desktop Assistant application currently automatically retrieves notifications that are configured for the Next Experience route from the [sys_notification] table and displays them on the user’s screen. This happens without engagement from the user and can result either from a Metric Rule associated with the end-user computer or from a Service Desk agent who is proactively engaging with the employee.

While these notifications are not truly pushed to the OS, the user experience is largely indistinguishable. For more information on how to create next experience notifications, see Create custom notifications in Next Experience.

Q. Can this be used in a top-secret air-gapped on-prem instance?

No - DEX is not available for on-prem at this time.

Integration Questions

Q. Does DEX leverage any AI or Machine Learning?

Yes - DEX uses Now Assist (ServiceNow AI) to leverage a conversational catalogue for engaging with requesters via Virtual Agent. DEX also uses Now Assist to summarize KB articles for requesters. In coming releases DEX will leverage ServiceNow AI Agents for automation.

Q. Will I have to use SOW (Service Operations Workspace) to monitor and take action with DEX?

SOW is recommended as it surfaces the data in a contextually relevant way. Without SOW it's really a classic view of tables without context.

Q. How does ServiceNow Shared Services interact with DEX? 

DEX uses the ServiceNow Shared Services to bring the data from the customer endpoints to the instance.

Q. Will integrations require MID server?  

No. DEX uses MID-less architecture. Using MID-less agents requires the instance to be set up to connect to a new shared service. Read more about DEX Architecture HERE. 

Q. How does communication happen between cloud services to instance and how it is different than Mid server architecture?

Both cloud services and instances are hosted ServiceNow data centers and communication is inter-service communication using mtls. On the other hand, mid server sits in customer's trusted network as a proxy to talk to ServiceNow instance.

Q. Does ServiceNow have API support and integration to different systems?

Yes, ServiceNow Platform integrates with hundreds of APIs including Splunk, Microsoft AD & Azure, JAMF, Jenkins.

Q. Does DEX ACC support’s Proxy decoding/inspection at customer Proxy level?
DEX ACC works on mTLS architecture where both the parties self-authenticate by exchanging keys and certificate issued by instance. mTLS is industry wide used method to keep communication safe so proxy level decoding or interception is not required.

Q. What version of Employee Center is needed to leverage DEX capabilities like Self Service and Proactive Engagement?
Employee Center (EC) standard is enough to showcase DEX self-help but other use cases that require Virtual Assistant or Now Assist may require additional entitlement.

Implementation Questions

Q. Do DEX alerts combine with AIOPs alerts in Express List?

Yes, Express List can be leveraged for DEX Metric Rules alerts.

Q. Which browsers are supported by the DEX browser extension?

Google Chrome 114 or higher and Microsoft Edge 96 or higher are currently supported.

Q. Can you install the web extension without the DEX client on the machine?

Agent Client Collector (ACC) is required for the Web Extension to collect and return data. Desktop Assistant application is not required for data collection but without it, employee engagement is only possible through the Employee Center.

Q. Will the browser extensions provide performance metrics for the ServiceNow instance?

Yes. ServiceNow can be added as a SaaS application to monitor the usage and performance of the Service Portal.

Q. When DEX sends alerts about application experience, is the URL sent for the CI, or the PC?

Both, the Impacted CI will be devices as part of related records and Impacted Service is the URL/domain app.

Q. Is DEX Agentless?

No, DEX requires the MID-less Agent Client Collector (ACC) on the End-User Computer.

Q. Does DEX require a MID server?

No, DEX exclusively uses the MID-less Agent Client Collector (ACC).

Q. Can we use the Agent Client Collector via MID-servers for our server infrastructure and simultaneously use the MID-less ACC for End-user Computers?

Yes.

Q. What if I use other agents - Tanium, Nexthink, etc. How does the agent fit with other agents and is it supposed to replace some of them?

DEX is a replacement for other end-user device/app monitors.

Q.  If I already have ACC-M/V, why do I need another ACC for DEX and how does this impact load?

The ACC for DEX is configured to collect data from DEX policies and DEX check definitions. ACC for DEX also collect data from the browser extension for app monitoring.  ACC for DEX is designed to be lightweight, and its load performance is continually being tested in our lab.

Reporting Questions

Q. Does DEX collect personal information from my computer?

You can read about the data DEX collects in the Community article HERE. 

Q. Can DEX provide monitoring data from a Virtual Machine?

Yes, provided the DEX client is installed on a persistent Virtual Machine.

Q. How long is data kept?

DEX uses the MetricBase datastore to store time-series data sampled at regular intervals. The MetricBase Series limit is controlled by data collection and retention policies for applications and devices that cannot be modified. For example, application and device metric data collected at 5-minute intervals from each device is retained for up to 7 days for troubleshooting purposes. Roll-ups of aggregated data are available for longer periods to analyze performance and usage trends. 

Q. Is data displayed in “Real Time” on the DEX Dashboards?

No, some of the data is collected every few minutes.

Q. For Monitoring and Metrics, is each version of the same software considered unique?

Yes. Each version to be monitored will have its own metrics.

Q. Do out-of-the-box Metric Rules exist for any applications?

When you initially install DEX, a set of pre-configured metric rules is available out of the box. Read more about Metric Rules and creating them HERE. 

For more detailed information on Digital End-User Experience (DEX), be sure to check out our DEX product Page HERE.

[Ayelet]

HI,  We have a use case of distributed end computers with monitors , where there is a need to detect the monitors, including some unique identifyer.  Does DEX support that. I found "peripherals' but that is too vague.  Thanks!

[Shailesh Das]

Hello - I repeat the question of Ayelet - can Monitor , Docking Station, Camera  be detected ?