Desktop Assistant notifications
Summarize
Summary of Desktop Assistant notifications
Desktop Assistant notifications allow your organization to instantly communicate important updates to end users across devices. This feature supports critical information delivery, enhancing Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement by providing reliable, timely notifications that raise user awareness without requiring direct action.
Show less
Notifications reach end users within two minutes and can be accessed as system push notifications on Windows and macOS or via the Desktop Assistant notifications list. The system supports up to 400,000 notifications daily, with a peak rate of 10,000 per minute.
Key Features
- Major Incident Management Notifications: Deliver real-time alerts about critical incidents to relevant users based on location and application usage. Notifications can be sent to all users in affected locations or targeted to impacted application users using configurable aggregation periods and frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly).
- Proactive Engagement Notifications: Inform users about device health events, detected issues, and remediation steps, such as prompts to restart devices to maintain optimal performance.
- Recipient List Customization: Allows tailoring of notification audiences for incident updates to ensure relevance and reduce notification fatigue.
- Configuration Controls: Administrators can configure API parameters, manage notification delivery duration via a Time-to-Live (TTL) property (up to seven days), and enable or disable notifications as needed.
Practical Benefits
- Ensure critical updates reach the right users promptly to support incident resolution and device health management.
- Minimize user disruption by targeting notifications based on location and recent application activity.
- Maintain control over notification lifespan and delivery to optimize communication effectiveness.
Desktop Assistant notifications enable your organization to communicate important updates to end users instantly, regardless of their device activity. This feature enables delivering critical information, supporting Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement.
Desktop Assistant notifications provide a reliable way to inform end users of critical updates with minimal effort. These notifications provide updates for awareness but aren’t directly actionable.
Desktop Assistant supports an optimum number of 400,000 notifications per day, with a maximum rate of 10,000 notifications per minute.
Accessing notifications
Access Desktop Assistant notifications as system push notifications on Windows and macOS devices, or from the Desktop Assistant notifications list. For more information, see View Desktop Assistant notifications.
Notifications should appear on end users’ devices within two minutes of generation.
Supported applications
Desktop Assistant supports notifications from Major Incident Management and Proactive Engagement.
- Major Incident Management: Major Incident Management sends real-time updates about critical incidents to recipients in the following base system recipient lists.
- All users in affected location(s): Updates are sent to all configured recipients in affected locations. For example, a Major Incident Management notification informs all employees in an affected location of a sudden network outage, ensuring they’re aware of the issue.
- Impacted application users in affected location(s): Updates are sent only to impacted recipients in affected locations. To make sure only relevant users receive updates, the recipient list
includes users with application usage above zero during a specified aggregation period and frequency. The aggregation period and frequency can be configured to one of the following options:
- Daily: 1–7 days
- Weekly: 1–4 weeks
- Monthly: 1–12 months
By default, the aggregation frequency is set to Daily, and the aggregation period is 7 days.
For example, if the aggregation frequency is set to daily and the aggregation period is seven days, notifications are sent to users in affected locations who have application usage above 0 over the last seven days. Similarly, if the frequency is set to weekly and the aggregation period is four weeks, notifications are sent to users in affected locations who have application usage above 0 over the last four weeks.
Each notification is delivered once to every logged-in device.
You can customize the Impacted application users in affected location(s) recipient list or create a notification for an incident using this list. For more information, see Customize recipient list for Major Incident Management updates and Compose communications for incidents and major incidents.
- Proactive Engagement: Proactive Engagement uses Desktop Assistant to notify users about the following device-related events:
- Actions that users must take to maintain device health.
- Issues detected on devices
- Steps to remediate issues by following the self-help instructions or using the linked resources.
For example, end users receive alerts to restart their devices if they haven’t done so in the recommended duration.
Configuring notifications
As a DEX administrator, you can configure and manage Desktop Assistant notifications.
You can configure API parameters to enable Desktop Assistant to send notifications for any update or activity. For more information, see API parameters to configure Desktop Assistant notifications.
You can define how long the system attempts to deliver notifications by configuring the Time-to-Live (TTL) value using the sn_dex_desktop.sn_desktop_assistant.notification_time_to_live property. The TTL can be set to a maximum of seven days. Older notifications exceeding the TTL are automatically discarded.
You can also enable and disable Desktop Assistant notifications. For more information, see Enable or disable notifications.