FAQ

Below you will find a list of common questions about Digital End-User Experience (DEX) that should give you a deeper understanding of the solution, how it is setup, and its capabilities.

What is DEX?

Q. What is the Digital Employee Experience tools market?

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools can provide a deeper understanding of employees’ experiences with digital technologies and enable digital workplace teams to build an approach focused on employees’ individual preferences.

Q. What is the ServiceNow Digital End-User Experience Product?

ServiceNow® Digital End-user Experience (DEX) is a product leveraging the Agent Client Collector (ACC-V) that IT deploys on end-user devices to monitor applications, networks, and devices to detect issues before they cause downtime or impact employee productivity.

DEX also provides a Desktop Assistant to provide employees with self-service options like local diagnostics, and that makes it easy to connect to additional support from IT.

Note that we deliberately use the same acronym (DEX) for our Digital End-user Experience product as the industry uses for the Digital Employee Experience market. We use ‘End-user’ because ServiceNow has a much broader set of offerings from Employee Workflows that cover the employee experience such as HR Service Delivery.

Setup Questions

Q. Which versions of ServiceNow will have the capability to use DEX?

Starting with Vancouver P6, and Washington.

Q. Who is entitled to DEX and what capabilities come with entitlement?

DEX is a stand-alone application and requires its own subscription. To purchase DEX from the ServiceNow Store, you must first be entitled to ITSM Pro or ITSM Enterprise. DEX contains Application & Device Health, Desktop Assistant, DEX Content Playbook.

Q. I am a global organization, is this available outside of the US and for other languages?

Yes, DEX is available globally in our ServiceNow Cloud and supports internationalization.

Note: DEX is not currently available to our ServiceNow FEDRamp, Regulated Markets, and MSP customers.

Q. Is there a DEX demo video?

Yes! You can view the DEX demo video here.

Q. What kind of devices can be monitored or used with DEX?

We currently support Windows and MacOS devices, and persistent VDI running on Windows can also be monitored.

Q. Has ServiceNow deployed DEX internally?

Yes! ServiceNow’s internal Desktop Technology team is Customer Zero for our latest innovations and DEX has been widely deployed in production at ServiceNow.

Q. Can I control/ restrict which data are collected?

It is currently possible to a deactivate a DEX check definition, which will stop collection of all fields within that check definition. It is not currently possible to edit a DEX check definition to include only certain fields.

Q. Is it possible to restrict who has access by perhaps a user group or location level?

Yes. Access is controlled by the ServiceNow platform Role Based Access Control system (RBAC). By assigning relevant DEX roles to the appropriate Assignment Groups, users will have specific levels of access to DEX data. Documentation Link

Q. Are there proactive push notifications/pop-ups to the end-user device available in the latest release?

The Desktop Assistant application currently automatically retrieves notifications that are configured for the Next Experience route from the [sys_notification] table and displays them on the user’s screen. This happens without engagement from the user and can result either from a Metric Rule associated with the end-user computer or from a Service Desk agent who is proactively engaging with the employee.

While these notifications are not truly pushed to the OS, the user experience is largely indistinguishable. For more information on how to create next experience notifications, see Create custom notifications in Next Experience.

Q. Can this be used in a top-secret air-gapped on-prem instance?

No - DEX is not available for on-prem at this time.

Integration Questions

Q. Does DEX use Now Assist?

Yes! The DEX Desktop Assistant app allows users with the required entitlements to directly access the ServiceNow Virtual Agent which is powered by Now Assist Generative AI.

Q. Will I have to use SOW (Service Operations Workspace) to monitor and take action with DEX?

SOW is recommended as it surfaces the data in a contextually relevant way. Without SOW its really a classic view of tables without the context

Q. How does ServiceNow Shared Services interact with DEX?

DEX uses the ServiceNow Shared Services to bring the data from the customer endpoints to the instance.

Q. Will integrations require MID server?

No. DEX uses MID-less architecture - Documentation Link

NOTE: Using MID-less agents requires the instance to be set up to connect to a new shared service.

Implementation Questions

Q. Do DEX alerts combine with AIOPs alerts in Express List?

Yes, Express List can be leveraged for DEX Metric Rules alerts.

Q. Which browsers are supported by the DEX browser extension?

Chrome and Edge are currently supported.

Q. Can you install the web extension without the DEX client on the machine?

Agent Client Collector (ACC) is required for the Web Extension to collect and return data. Desktop Assistant application is not required for data collection but without it, employee engagement is not possible.

Q. Will the browser extensions provide performance metrics for the ServiceNow instance?

Yes. ServiceNow can be added as a SaaS application to monitor the usage and performance of the Service Portal.

Q. When DEX sends alerts about application experience, is the URL sent for the CI, or the PC?

Both, the Impacted CI will be devices as part of related records and Impacted Service is the URL/domain app.

Q. Is DEX Agentless?

No, DEX requires the MID-less Agent Client Collector (ACC) on the End-User Computer.

Q. Does DEX require a MID server?

No, DEX exclusively uses the MID-less Agent Client Collector (ACC).

Q. Can we use the Agent Client Collector via MID-servers for our server infrastructure and simultaneously use the MID-less ACC for End-user Computers?

Yes.

Q. What if I use other agents - Tanium, Nexthink, etc. How does the agent fit with other agents and is it supposed to replace some of them?

DEX is a replacement for other end-user device/app monitors.

Q. What if we’ve already deployed the older version of Agent Client Collector (ACC) that uses a MID server?

Yes. ServiceNow can be added as a SaaS application to monitor the usage and performance of the Service Portal - Documentation Link

Q. If I already have ACC-M/V, why do I need another ACC for DEX and how does this impact load?

The ACC for DEX is configured to collect data from DEX policies and DEX check definitions. ACC for DEX also collect data from the browser extension for app monitoring. ACC for DEX is designed to be lightweight, and its load performance is continually being tested in our lab.

For more information on the ACC Framework see our product documentation - Documentation Link

Reporting Questions

Q. Does DEX collect personal information from my computer?

You can read about the data DEX collects on the ServiceNow - Documentation Link.

Q. Can DEX provide monitoring data from a Virtual Machine?

Yes, provided the DEX client is installed on a persistent Virtual Machine.

Q. How long is data kept?

DEX uses the MetricBase datastore to store time-series data sampled at regular intervals. The MetricBase Series limit is controlled by data collection and retention policies for applications and devices that cannot be modified. For example, application and device metric data collected at 5-minute intervals from each device is retained for up to 7 days for troubleshooting purposes. Roll-ups of aggregated data are available for longer periods to analyze performance and usage trends." - Documentation Link

Q. Is data displayed in “Real Time” on the DEX Dashboards?

No, some of the data is collected every few minutes.

Q. For Monitoring and Metrics, is each version of the same software considered unique?

Yes. Each version to be monitored will have its own metrics.

Q. Do OOTB Metric Rules exist for any applications?

When you initially install DEX, a set of pre-configured metric rules is available out of the box. - Documentation Link

For more detailed information on Digital End-User Experience (DEX), be sure to check out our DEX product Page HERE.