Understanding user sentiment is essential for enabling IT to deliver the best possible digital employee experience. An important evolutionary step for ControlUp, we’re happy to announce that we have added user sentiment reporting to ControlUp Edge DX.

The real-time metrics that ControlUp displays are indispensable for assessing the health of IT infrastructure.

But these metrics only tell half the story.

The half that we, as technologists, often miss, is this: How do users feel about their experience? 

For example, if we are monitoring a system and it has a high CPU queue length, that suggests that the system is starved for CPU cycles and, as a result, applications might lag or become sluggish. But these metrics show only the cause of a problem and how we might fix it. They don’t tell us about how frustrated our end-users were, how their productivity was impacted, or how stressed out they got; they don’t actually tell us how the user felt about their interactions with the system. 

To address this issue—and to ascertain how people actually feel about their user experience—we have added user sentiment reporting to ControlUp Edge DX. With this enhancement, you can query users to see now just what they are doing in an application, but how they feel about their experience with it. It’s an exciting feature that will give IT a powerful arrow in their quiver to deliver the best possible digital employee experience.

ControlUp Edge DX User Sentiment Reporting: How It Works

There are two tabs in Edge DX that are used for user sentiment: Surveys and Sentiment. The Sentiment tab shows the results of surveys that have been completed, while the Survey tab is used to set up the questions to query users about how they are feeling about their experience.

In IT, we are alway trying to strike the right balance of compute resources to give our users; give them too little and they’ll have an unsatisfying experience, give them too many and scarce resources are wasted. 

For example, an engineering firm may have an update to an application and they need to know if their current computer hardware is adequate to support it. So, they deploy it to a small group of users and then monitor their computer metrics. This would give us some idea about its performance, but that is only an indicator. To really understand the user’s experience with the update and to know how well it is performing for them, we need to ask them.

To use our new user sentiment feature, first select Survey from the Dashboards drop-down menu, then select New Survey.

The wizard walks you through selecting the language(s) the survey should be in, who will receive the survey and when it will go out, and, of course, the questions for the users.

After you have finished creating the survey, it will be shown on the dashboard.

When the survey goes live, users will get a notification on their desktop, asking them to respond. To fancy things up a bit, the survey can be customized with a logo.

While the survey is live (and after it is finished) you can take a peek at the results by selecting the Sentiment tab. 

This is just a brief overview of Edge DX’s User Sentiment feature. I didn’t touch on some of the more advanced features in it, such as question branching and user grouping, but I think it gives you a glimpse of its power. 

User sentiment is an important evolutionary step for IT as it allows us to see how users actually perceive their environment rather than using metrics to ascertain it. We’re excited about this and the other new features we’re bringing to ControlUp Edge DX to help deliver a truly great digital employee experience to our customers.

To learn more about setting up and using Edge DX see these articles. To take Edge DX out for a spin, schedule a demo and we will show you more features that can be set up in less than ten minutes without deploying any additional infrastructure as it is totally a SaaS based monitoring solution for Windows, Linux and macOS based devices.