End-User Experience Analytics: An Unconventional Approach to Enterprise Data Analysis
By leveraging end-user trend analysis, your organization can create a proactive, preventive approach to IT management that ensures your employees have the best possible experience.
- By Amitabh Sinha
- February 16, 2024
According to a NewVantage Partners survey, almost 92% of organizations report achieving measurable business value from their data and analytics this year. As technology makes dark data -- data that businesses collect, process, and store in the course of operations but don’t use for other purposes -- more accessible and analytics becomes increasingly integrated into daily business operations, organizations that can effectively use analytics will be at a significant advantage. However, what if there were even more sources of untapped data available that could help businesses enhance their decision-making across critical operations?
Ten years ago, the end-user experience of an enterprise user was tightly controlled by IT. Most of the applications ran in IT-managed data centers, updates were carefully performed by IT only after weeks, or even months, of testing, and users could only access these applications from IT-managed PCs within an office.
Today a large portion of the applications are cloud-based SaaS applications that IT cannot control. Most users are hybrid (on site and remote), and there are many more security agents running on each endpoint to secure them. Complicating matters, in this environment, the experience for any end user is no longer under IT control as applications, drivers, security agents, and even operating systems change constantly.
Poor end-user computing performance and downtime can eventually lead to dissatisfaction and job turnover. Although a loss of employees is obviously detrimental, poor end-user experience can also take a financial toll on your company, extending beyond immediate expenses such as increased IT hours to include hidden costs such as increased downtime and reduced employee output. Thus, visibility into end-user computing environments with real-time data is critical to understanding user access, performance, and happiness levels.
The New Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Traditional VDI, used during the on-premises days, required ongoing maintenance of portals, brokers, licensing servers, and databases to ensure endpoints and gateways were secure. When work was confined to a single location -- the confines of an office space, for exmple -- this approach was adequate. If users had a problem with their on-premises desktop, they could bring it up with their IT teams in person.
Cloud-native VDI is a simple service where customers can deploy VDI for their end users without having to deploy and update tens of different components. Cloud-native VDI has a wealth of data available, continuously collected from hundreds of data sources across endpoints, gateways, enterprise connectors, and multiple clouds. This data can be highly valuable when your organization wants to improve its employees’ productivity and satisfaction.
The Importance of Monitoring and Collecting End-User Satisfaction Data
By monitoring end-user satisfaction, your enterprise can identify which parts of its global deployments are running best and which are falling behind. This information can then be used to make informed decisions about how to improve the performance and usability of their VDI environments.
A Tool for Tracking End-User Satisfaction
Consider the modern concept of leveraging end-user trend analysis to distill insights across enterprises’ IT infrastructures.
Cloud-native VDI provides real-time data about end-user experiences and trends across multicloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments. These modern end-user computing tools equip IT teams with capabilities for maintaining reliability, consistency, and peak performance. They ingest data from integrated monitoring, real-time incident alerts, performance analytics, and in-product user feedback.
By collecting these key performance metrics from many endpoints, gateways, and other components within the end-to-end VDI infrastructure, IT teams can access a summary of these performance ratings and delve into virtual desktop pools that exhibit lower end-user satisfaction ratings and compare them to pools with higher ratings. This comparison reveals specific factors influencing user satisfaction, such as CPU or memory utilization, network conditions, and round-trip time. From there, your IT teams can quickly address the issue at the individual or pool level and prevent similar issues from impacting users in the future.
Cloud-Native VDI for User Happiness
As organizations embrace cloud-native VDI, they gain access to a wealth of data that can be used to improve the performance and usability of their multicloud, multiregional, and global environments. This data can also be used to identify and address issues that impact end-user satisfaction. By leveraging end-user trend analysis, your organization can create a proactive, preventive approach to IT management that ensures your employees have the best possible experience.
About the Author
Amitabh Sinha is the CEO and co-founder of Workspot where he is responsible for driving the company's strategic vision, overseeing day-to-day operations, and guiding its growth initiatives. You can reach Amitabh via email, Twitter/X, or LinkedIn.