Exploring Digital End-User Experience

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Digital End-User Experience

    The Digital End-User Experience (DEX) suite in ServiceNow Zurich provides proactive, end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of applications, networks, and end-user devices. It enables your IT teams to diagnose root causes of issues rather than just symptoms, improving overall digital experience across your organization. Key components include Application and Device Health, Desktop Assistant, Digital Experience Score, DEX Content Playbook, and Proactive Engagement.

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    Key Features

    • Application and Device Health: Monitors application crashes, system health, and device metrics centrally, allowing IT to analyze trends and performance without extra monitoring tools.
    • Desktop Assistant: A centralized hub for end users to view requests, check device health, test internet connectivity, and access usage metrics, enhancing self-service capabilities.
    • Role-Based Access: Different roles (DEX Administrator, Engineer, User, Service Desk Agent) have tailored access and responsibilities, ensuring appropriate control over configurations, troubleshooting, and remedial actions.
    • Integration with Service Desk: Service Desk agents can access DEX device health directly from incident records to investigate issues, apply resolutions, and monitor remediation progress within the ServiceNow platform.
    • Software Asset Management Integration: DEX application data integrates with SAM to provide software metering and licensing insights, helping reduce license costs through better asset management.

    Key Outcomes

    • Proactive Visibility: Gain insights into end-user experience regardless of location, device, or network, enabling quicker identification of system issues and user-impacting problems.
    • Increased Productivity: Enable end users and IT staff to troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently, reducing downtime and support workload.
    • Issue Analysis and Performance Evaluation: Use data-driven insights to identify pain points, usage patterns, and areas for improvement, enhancing user engagement and system reliability.
    • Enhanced End-User Engagement: Continuous monitoring and measurement of digital experience lead to improved motivation, job satisfaction, and reduced turnover among employees.
    • Optimized Digital Workplace: Empower employees with tools like Desktop Assistant for seamless communication and access to resources, fostering a better overall digital environment.

    The Digital End-User Experience (DEX) suite offers proactive visibility to help you understand and improve the end-user experience across your organization. It includes Application and Device Health, DEX Content Playbook, Desktop Assistant, Digital Experience Score​, and Proactive Engagement to provide unique benefits to diagnose and address negative experiences.

    Digital End-User Experience overview

    The Digital End-User Experience (DEX) provides end-to-end visibility into the health of applications, networks, and end-user devices. DEX provides such features as application, user and device navigation, trend analysis, and various useful metrics. With DEX you can identify the root cause of an issue, rather than just treating the symptoms.

    Digital End-User Experience users

    For examples of how different people in your organization would use DEX Application and Device Health, see these users and roles.

    Table 1. Application and Device Health users and roles
    Role title [name] Contains roles Description
    DEX administrator

    [sn_dex.admin]
    • sn_dex.user
    • sn_dex.engineer
    • agent_client_collector_admin
    • report_admin
    		 Responsible for managing user access to DEX, managing the applications that are being monitored, and handling onboarding or offboarding-related tasks. They also troubleshoot any issues that arise within the application.
    DEX engineer

    [sn_dex.engineer]

    		 sn_dex.user Responsible for accessing and executing the remedial actions.
    DEX user

    [sn_dex.user]
    • dependency_views
    • agent_client_collector_user
    • sow_incident_read
    • mbplus_reader
    • sam_user
    • evt_mgmt_user
    		 Responsible for accessing and using the features provided by DEX.
    DEX Service Desk agent

    [sn_dex.service_desk_user]

    		 Not applicable Responsible for L1 or L2 support representatives accessing DEX from the incident platform to explore and investigate the details of the devices linked to the incident.

    Also responsible for accessing and executing the remedial actions allowed for this role.

    For examples of how different people in your organization would use Desktop Assistant, see these use cases.

    Table 2. Desktop Assistant users and responsibilities
    User Responsibilities
    Desktop Assistant administrator

    [sn_dex_desktop.admin]

    		 Responsible for managing configurations and resolving any issues that might arise within the application.
    Desktop Assistant user

    [sn_dex_desktop.user]

    		 Responsible for using Desktop Assistant. User can't configure any items within the application.

    Digital End-User Experience workflow

    Depending on your role, you can use Digital End-User Experience for a variety of scenarios.

    Figure 1. Digital End-User Experience overview
    Digital End-User Experience workflow

    Digital End-User Experience benefits

    Having a positive digital experience can lead to numerous benefits, including the following:

    Proactive visibility into the end-user experience

    Gain insights into the digital experience of your application and services from the end-user viewpoint, regardless of their location, device type, or network connectivity. Identify and measure the health of user systems — view what applications and system crashes are happening. All this reliability data is brought together in one central workspace, letting your IT team dive deeper into more detailed data without deploying additional monitors.

    Increased productivity

    Access digital tools and resources easily to troubleshoot IT issues, reset passwords, or access software. This ability can lead to increased productivity by reducing the burden on IT staff. The DEX Content Playbook includes policies and checks for metrics and subsequent actions required for different operating systems.

    Issue analysis

    Identify and analyze issues by providing insights into pain points, usage patterns, performance, and impact. By analyzing DEX data, organizations can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance the digital workplace experience for their end users.

    Performance evaluation

    Provide insights into the productivity, efficiency, user behavior, and engagement. DEX provides a wealth of device performance and health information. This data can help IT teams understand how a given application is being used and identify areas for improvement.

    Enhanced engagement

    Promote end-user experience and productivity by continuously measuring and monitoring application and device health metrics. Gain end-to-end visibility and insights into the overall user experience and quickly identify users, applications, and devices with poor experiences that need your attention. A positive digital experience helps you to improve end-user engagement leading to increased motivation, better job satisfaction, and lower turnover rates.

    Optimized end-user digital experience

    Empower your employees with Desktop Assistant – a centralized hub that provides a comprehensive view of requests and device health, enables internet connection testing, and offers a usage metrics dashboard for seamless communication with the ServiceNow® instance.

    Better together

    DEX for Service Desk Agents
    As a Service Desk agent, navigate to the DEX device health page from the ServiceNow Core UI incident experience or from the Investigate tab within the Incident experience in Service Operations Workspace (SOW). Configure a computer Configuration Item (CI) and install the DEX plugin for the ability to analyze device metrics from within the platform, getting valuable insights for effective issue investigation.

    Use incident investigation with DEX to review device health, detected issues, and suggested resolutions. Implement resolutions and remedial actions directly from your workspace and monitor the status of actions. For more information, see Incident investigation with DEX.

    Use the DEX issue diagnosis and resolution agentic workflow to resolve detected issues with automated root cause analysis, targeted resolution plans, and documentation of resolution summary in incident records. For more information, see DEX issue diagnosis and resolution agentic workflow.

    Software Asset Management
    Unifying the experience of DEX application with Software Asset Management (SAM) software enables you to access SAM-normalized software content. This integration provides software metering data from DEX to integrate with SAM for software licensing reclamation and, in turn, reduce software license costs. For more information, see Using DEX or SAM for application monitoring.

    What to explore next

    To learn more about configuring and using Digital End-User Experience, see: