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Technical White PaperNexthink End-User IT AnalyticsEnhances LANDesk IT Service andPC Configuration Management
Technical White Paper Nexthink End-User IT AnalyticsContentsExecutive Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Greater Visibility Drives Better Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Nexthink Integration with LANDesk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3Increasing Efficiency in Incident Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Problem Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Real-Time End-User IT Analytics Complements Configuration Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Copyright 2013, LANDesk Software, Inc. This document contains confidential information of LANDesk Software. LANDesk makes no warranty for the use of the information herein and assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear,nor does it make a commitment to update the information contained herein.LSI-1257 10/13 MK/BB/DL2www.landesk.com
Technical White Paper Nexthink End-User IT AnalyticsExecutive OverviewNexthink products provide real-time analytics about thedelivery and consumption of IT services from the perspectiveof users at the endpoints. The insight Nexthink providescomplements IT Service Management (ITSM) methodologiesand PC lifecycle management (PCLM).The LANDesk Service Desk IT service management solutionenables organizations to efficiently manage a variety of ITprocesses such as incident and problem management forincreased user productivity. LANDesk Management Suiteprovides industry-leading PCLM capabilities for endpointconfiguration management.Real-time understanding and analytics on what is happeningat the endpoints creates visibility into how IT services arebeing consumed, the end-user experience, and if SLAs are trulybeing met. These analytics provide the feedback that helps theorganization know with certainty that the support and endpointmanagement functions align with the business objectives.This paper highlights the benefits of using LANDesk ServiceDesk and LANDesk Management Suite in conjunction withNexthink. This product combination drives efficiency andreduced costs for IT operations and service management teamswhile maintaining end-user productivity.Greater Visibility Drives Better OperationsIT organizations need to provide some level of configurationmanagement to endpoints in the organization for deploymentof operating systems, applications, patches, etc. Manyorganizations align their IT service management operations withthe PC configuration management functions so that employeesworking to resolve incidents and problems have a method toinvestigate and remediate issues on the endpoints. In both theconfiguration management and service management teams,there is great value in knowing in real-time what is happening atthe endpoints.For example, when incidents and problems are being workedon in LANDesk Service Desk, it is critical to know the scopeof the outage and what other endpoints are impacted in realtime. What are the common characteristics of endpoints wherethe user is experiencing an issue? With real-time visibilityinto recent changes to the system, connections to servers,connections to external web sites, and application behavior,service desk analysts have context to resolve an incidentefficiently.Nexthink’s analytics provides the real-time visibility to validatethat the changes implemented work as expected and provide3support staff with access to detailed diagnostic informationin the context of a specific incident, request, change, or otherITSM process.Following Change and Release concepts into Deployment, whenorganizations deploy software via LANDesk Management Suite,it is very valuable to know how the endpoints have received thenew update. Is the new software working as expected? Are thereother applications that are now having issues after the change?Also, before deploying software or configuration updates toendpoints, it is critical to know what applications the user isrunning as well as what network connections are being madefrom those applications. Visibility into network connections,bandwidth usage, and application behavior from Nexthinkhelps organizations properly plan for, track, and validate thedeployment of changes.Nexthink Integration with LANDeskNexthink maintains a real-time repository of information on abroad range of data associated with the business users and theassociated endpoints. This data includes information regardingall applications and services running locally on the endpoint andhow those applications are interacting with network resources.Nexthink also provides visibility into applications that arehosted in a browser or applications that are accessed via remoteconsole sessions.A Nexthink collector is installed and runs on each of theendpoints in the organization. The collector sends data to theNexthink engine in real-time to provide a centralized, dynamic,company-wide view of the operational status and configurationof all applications and services as seen from the perspective ofthe endpoints.LANDesk Management Suite is used to easily deploy theNexthink collector to endpoints. Since there is no configurationrequired for the collector (it always reports all the informationall the time), is it very simple to deploy the collector to allendpoints.Then, through use of various APIs that are supplied byLANDesk, the Nexthink analytics features can be accesseddirectly from within the LANDesk Management Suite andService Desk consoles, in the context of the process, activity, orconfiguration item being worked on.Furthermore, the same APIs also provide alerting, notification,and interaction between the Nexthink console and the ServiceDesk, enabling, for example, knowledge searches from Nexthinkreported errors, or creating Incidents for computers identified inNexthink as encountering issues.www.landesk.com
Technical White Paper Nexthink End-User IT AnalyticsIncreasing Efficiency in IncidentManagementLANDesk Service Desk is used in organizations for incidentmanagement. When service desk analysts are resolvingincidents, it is imperative that they have quick and easy access torelevant information regarding the impacted configuration item(CI). This information is leveraged in diagnosing and resolvingthe incident efficiently.To investigate and help resolve many types of incidents, theservice desk team needs to have real-time visibility of what ishappening at the endpoint. The service desk must know howthings are working from the perspective of the endpoint devicethat accesses the services.Suppose a service desk analyst is responding to an incidentassociated with a user reporting that their machine isexperiencing an application fault. This is an event that Nexthinkcaptures. Details about the activity on the device at the point offailure are immediately available to the analyst.In most cases, when an incident is created within LANDeskService Desk, the incident is associated with a user and theirassociated endpoint device (CI). Through the Nexthink –LANDesk integration, Nexthink information and analytics canbe accessed directly from the incident in Service Desk.In addition, the Nexthink finder is registered as a new actionassociated with the CI itself. This allows navigation throughrelated CMDB diagrams in Service Desk, and from therethe ability to also view recent performance and behaviorinformation immediately from Nexthink.This contextual drill-down supplies the technician immediatelywith additional details to further investigate and progress theincident.The console integration also works in the other direction. Fromthe context of looking at the details of an endpoint from theNexthink finder, an incident—or any other ITSM process—canbe initiated from within LANDesk Service Desk.4Giving a service desk analyst real-time access to this dataprovides additional context to help make more accuratediagnosis of the incident as well as context on how to remediateand close the incident. Nexthink provides visibility to helpisolate and determine if the issue is at the endpoint, at theapplication server, or on the network. With this visibility it iseasier for the service desk to drive a process that is based uponcontextually relevant information.www.landesk.com
Technical White Paper Nexthink End-User IT AnalyticsNow with this level of context about the nature of the incidentand what is happening on the endpoint, the technician canuse LANDesk Management Suite to deploy the configurationchange to remediate the issue.After the service desk analyst has made the appropriate change,they can validate that the incident is no longer impacting theendpoint because they can review the real-time Nexthink datato verify the incident is resolved.(server) for real-time analytics, which provide the endpointoperations team real-time visualization of the IT infrastructurefrom the end-user perspective. Nexthink analyzes all localprocesses and software changes, local resource usage, networkresponse time, throughput, and network latency. At any time,the LANDesk administrator knows exactly what applicationsare being used, which servers/websites/web services thoseapplications connect to, and the experiences of users and anyissues with those applications and IT services.Problem ManagementSoftware DeliveryMost organizations using LANDesk Service Desk also havea Problem Management methodology in addition to IncidentManagement, allowing proactive research and investigation intounderlying causes of repeating incidents.Suppose the LANDesk administrator is planning to deploy anew version of a line-of-business application. With the Nexthinkanalytics, the administrator knows exactly how the currentapplication is performing and interacting with the networkresources. This visibility provides deep context to help determinewhen and how to deploy the update.Nexthink’s real-time analytics also provide valuable insightto aid in resolving problems more effectively through greateranalysis and investigation.For example, let’s say a support technician is working ona problem where certain systems are getting errors whenconnecting to a line-of-business application in a remote datacenter. From the Nexthink finder, the service desk analystcan readily see all the systems across the enterprise that areencountering issues making the connection, or if the issue isisolated to systems with a common location.Nexthink provides an instantaneous (within seconds) statusof software distribution job installation status. Nexthinkalso provides a detailed timeline of all software installations(distribution jobs, end-user initiated, and applications thatupdate automatically) on an end-user’s device.Once the application is deployed, the administrator hasimmediate feedback on how the updated application is behavingon the system. In fact, all applications on the system aremonitored without need for configuring Nexthink. From thisview the administrator can readily see that the whole system,and not just the updated application, is behaving as expected.PatchingIn all cases, the service desk analyst that is investigating andresolving a problem has much more detailed insight intothe operational and configuration status of all endpoints,connections, applications, users, and network services in realtime when using Nexthink, yet is still working in a processapproach aligned with best practices.Real-Time End-User IT AnalyticsComplements Configuration ManagementThe Nexthink collector monitors both physical and virtualdesktops in real-time and sends the data to a Nexthink engine5Similar to the deployment of applications, Nexthink provides thereal-time visibility for administrators during the rollout of patches.All organizations struggle with the tradeoff between timely rolloutof patches balanced by a confidence that there aren’t unintendedside effects of a patch update. This is another scenario wherereal-time analytics complements the patch updating provided fromLANDesk.Tracking Web and Hybrid ApplicationsOf course many applications are more than simple executablesdeployed and run from the local hard drive. Many organizationsleverage applications that connect to servers in the cloud. Itis also more and more common for critical line-of-businessapplications to be hosted in the browser. These browserapplications of course connect to web services both insidethe organization as well as services from the cloud. Nexthinkprovides the visibility to help the LANDesk administrator fullyvisualize and understand the interaction of traditional andbrowser applications on the endpoint.www.landesk.com
Technical White Paper Nexthink End-User IT AnalyticsSummaryThe LANDesk Total User Management solution, includingLANDesk Management Suite and LANDesk Service Desk,drive a process for scalable PC configuration managementand effective IT service management. When Nexthink isused in conjunction with LANDesk, the additional real-timeinformation provides operations and support teams the visibilityneeded to plan and implement change management morequickly and efficiently as well as diagnose and resolve incidentsand problems.Integrated reports and dashboards help IT organizationsmeasure efficiency, customer satisfaction, and service deliveryobjectives.Contact InformationFor more information, email us at sales@landesk.com or speakwith a LANDesk product representative:nIn the U.S. call: 1.800.982.2130nIn Europe call: 44 (0) 1344 442100nIn APAC call: 1300 661 871For specific country offices and contact information, visitwww.landesk.com.6www.landesk.com
service desk team needs to have real-time visibility of what is happening at the endpoint. The service desk must know how things are working from the perspective of the endpoint device that accesses the services. In most cases, when an incident is created within LANDesk Service Desk
