Understanding The Employee Digital Experience

With the recent launch of the iPhone 15, I was thinking about my iPhone 13 and how the battery does not last very long, all the applications I have installed but never used, and the excitement of getting a new iPhone to improve my digital experience. That’s just my own digital experience. What if I oversaw 10,000 employee’s digital experience for their computers? How good was their digital experience when the device was new, and what is it like today? I know the devices were snappy, responsive, and fast when they were new. Despite the devices being patched, there have been complaints regarding blue screens, slow application startup times, and unreliable networks. The question arises as to when the employees’ digital experience began to suffer, what caused it to deteriorate, and most importantly, how these issues can be resolved.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Peter Druker

Built-in tools help troubleshoot, not understand.

Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems have several built-in troubleshooting tools that can help diagnose and resolve various issues. These tools are suitable for troubleshooting if you can remote into the computer but provide little value in understanding the machine’s performance over time.

Understanding a digital experience

Monitoring performance metrics is essential for IT professionals responsible for maintaining a fleet of computers. However, capturing metrics over time provides valuable insights into the trending health of the devices. For instance, if you deployed a patch or a software upgrade, how did that change affect the digital experience? Does an application have a memory leak, increased disk queue length, or increased user input delay?

The image below shows ControlUp’s detailed view of a Windows PC with historical performance data. As you can see, Memory Usage had an event in September.

The image below is a drill-down on Memory Usage (GB). The drill-down below shows the Processes running and how much memory the process consumes. We can see that explorer.exe is consuming 2,879 MB of RAM.

With ControlUp’s numerous built-in reports, you can gain a historical perspective of device performance. Customizing reports to generate data on specific devices can be particularly helpful in troubleshooting issues and improving employees’ digital experience. Analyzing the data obtained from these reports makes it easier to identify the root cause of performance issues and take corrective measures to resolve them.

One of my favorite reports is the Application Usage Statistics. The report below is sorted on Avg. Launch Time. Avg. Launch Time is the time it takes for the user to click on the application to when it is available. The image below shows that Excel.exe loaded in 95.87 seconds, consumed 119.07% of the CPU, and took up 1644.47 MB of RAM. The spreadsheet the users loaded took more resources than the device could handle. If this user needs to access this spreadsheet often, it’s time for a device upgrade.

Understanding the employee digital experience is about understanding and monitoring desktops and how built-in tools in Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems can help troubleshoot but provide little value in understanding the machine’s performance over time. To gain a perspective on the digital employee experience, you need to look at the historical performance of the devices and applications. Analyzing the historical data makes it easier to identify the root cause of performance issues and take corrective measures to resolve them. The article also highlights ControlUp’s numerous built-in reports, such as Application Usage Statistics, which can help identify the need for a device upgrade.

Other related readings:

[Solved] Desktop Support Problems

Find and Fix Issues Faster Using Global Filters in ControlUp Edge DX

Three New Dashboards to Proactively Monitor the Health of Your Desktops and Applications

Troubleshooting Zoom Calls Just Got Simpler – ControlUp