SaaS Application Monitoring Made Easy with ControlUp for Apps

As you can read in Guy’s blog post, today marks another important milestone with the addition of ControlUp for Apps to our ControlUp ONE DEX platform. With the addition of this new module, those that are tasked with minimizing friction and optimizing productivity for their digital workplace now have another tool in their toolbox, allowing them to better understand and improve the digital experience no matter what type of application is being used, local apps, virtualized apps or, as is the focus for this new capability, SaaS and web applications.

And as we have done before with the introduction of other new solutions, we wanted to make sure that we build something that was easy to set up and configure, but most importantly easy to use, no matter the different levels of subject matter expertise inside an IT organization. In this blog post we will go into some of the details on how ControlUp for Apps works, how to set things up, and cover some common use cases where this new technology can deliver immediate value to your teams. This blog post will be rich in videos and screenshots, but relatively light on text (let’s see how that looks at the end of writing this blog). If reading is your preference, please check out our excellent documentation on the topic. Ok. Let’s dive in!

Initial setup and configuration

Agent and extension deployment

No matter if you are If you are already licensed for ControlUp for Apps (e.g. if you are a ControlUp ONE Platform customer) or not, a new icon should be visible in the main menu of your DEX interface. When you select this, you will either be able to start a trial (if unlicensed), or immediately the ControlUp for Apps onboarding wizard will appear on your screen that will get you through the initial steps required to monitor SaaS and web applications.

There are just 3 steps in the onboarding wizard:

1. If you want to deploy the required agent module to your devices (a Windows device with the ControlUp for Desktops agent is a pre-requisite)
2. If you want to automatically deploy the browser extension
3. What SaaS apps you want to add to monitor in your environment

If you are not quite ready to push out the required components to all your devices, you can say no for steps 1 and 2 and just add the SaaS apps you use in your environment in step 3. Once you click Finish after step 3, you can go to the ControlUp for Apps settings page and configure your deployment settings more granularly, either using device groups or tags, very similar to the agent version control settings for ControlUp for Desktops.

Adding Application Groups to a scoring profile

If you go back to the ControlUp for Apps tab in the interface, you will see…nothing! Just an empty page…

The reason for this is that although we added SaaS applications that we want to monitor in the previous step, to actually start collecting data and presenting this in DEX interface, we need to add the application groups from step 3 of the onboarding wizard to a scoring profile. This step will ensure that we can calculate the application scores based on metric thresholds and that any issues (also referred to as “breaches”) with a SaaS application, no matter if it’s in the context of employee-centric troubleshooting or if you are looking at the overall health of a SaaS application, are presented up in the platform correctly. In this video I will show you how to do this. Now if you go back to the ControlUp for Apps tab in the interface, you will see…probably still nothing! But that’s because we need to give it some time to start collecting enough data. This should start in a few minutes, assuming that you have deployed the agent module and extension to enough devices that are actively in use to generate a relevant data set. This is what it looks like in my environment after running some SaaS apps with a very small number of end-users.

Adding your own SaaS and web apps

Although we added the URLs for 30 popular SaaS apps to the onboarding wizard, with more being added in the future, it’s very possible that you have other SaaS or possibly company web applications in your environment for which you want to monitor the digital experience. Adding those is very straight forward, and to do that we have to return to the App Groups tab in the Employee settings. And just like with the step above, we will need to add the new application group to the existing or a new scoring profile. And that is all there is to do from a setup and configuration point of view. The three videos above were about 9 minutes in total, and that was with adding additional apps and explanations, so the whole setup is possible to do in less than 5 minutes.

How to use the SaaS application experience data

As Guy laid out in his announcement blog, there are two main use cases we are targeting with this initial release of ControlUp for Apps. One is tailored towards service desk and desktop IT teams, that often have to handle end-user reported issues with their digital workplace experience. The other main use case is focused on application owners and IT operations teams (which depending on the size of your IT team, could well be the same teams that manages the digital workplace overall). Let’s have a look at how both of these different audiences would use this new technology.

Employee-centric troubleshooting for service desk teams

Since the introduction of our true employee experience scores and employee dashboards last year, many of our customers have adopted a more employee-centric approach and are now using these dashboards as part of their daily toolset to find and fix issues that employees report when using their digital workplace. And although reception was overwhelmingly positive, one thing that regularly came in feedback sessions with customers was the need for more detail and granularity. The original employee details screen was either lacking certain details or didn’t do the best job at presenting it clearly, so with the introduction of ControlUp for Apps, we are also excited to announce the availability of our revamped employee detail screen.

But there’s more than meets the eye. This new view allows you to quickly pinpoint issues across the digital workplace and when needed drilldown further to get the details that leads you on the path to resolution of the issue. In the next video I will take you on a tour of the various elements of this dashboard and what they mean. And this new employee details dashboard is where ControlUp for Apps will reflect any issues that employees might be having when using monitored SaaS applications. Or sometimes point you in a different direction, for example when poor WiFi connectivity is causing application slowness. Through visual correlation, we allow service desk employees to do root cause analysis much quicker than an explanation from the end-user would be.

Employee-centric dashboards for IT operations teams

To conclude this blog post, let’s have a look at the various dashboards that are more relevant for application owners and IT operations teams. No matter if they are tasked with the overall health and performance of the SaaS application stack, or maybe have a narrower interest, maybe a specific app or maybe are interested in usage metrics, for example to reduce SaaS license cost upon next renewal, ControlUp for Apps offers a wealth of data that can help you improve SaaS application performance and cost.