Extracting User Experience and Device Insights with Workspace ONE Intelligence Mobile Device Telemetry

Historically, IT organizations have concentrated on ensuring the security of endpoints and the efficient delivery of resources, thus enabling users to access necessary tools and information seamlessly. However, in recent years, the evolution in workplace dynamics toward more flexible work arrangements has prompted these organizations to shift their focus. Nowadays, there is an increasing emphasis on analyzing how users interact with the resources at their disposal, whether through desktops, mobile devices, or critical business and productivity applications. Gaining insights into user behavior and experiences is now more crucial than ever, as it allows organizations to proactively identify and address potential issues, enhancing user satisfaction and productivity.

In response to this shifting landscape, the Workspace ONE Digital Employee Experience solution equips IT departments with advanced tools to gather comprehensive telemetry data from both physical and virtual desktops, as well as mobile devices. This capability extends across a wide array of applications, encompassing desktop, mobile, and web-based platforms. Utilizing this telemetry data, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of user interactions, which in turn leads to improved strategies for enhancing user experience.

This blog post will delve into how IT departments can harness the Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK to collect detailed mobile device telemetry. This data collection is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of user experiences, thereby facilitating targeted improvements.

Data Collection through Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK

Device and application telemetry can be collected through Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK integration. There are almost 1,000 different attributes encompassing app-level and device-level data collected via Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK. The full attribute list can be found in our product documentation: Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK.

For app-level data, Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK collects information on the app load time, application crash and exception data, and network insights. For internally developed apps, app developers can specify if they would like to collect any data points on different user actions like logins and account registrations. These are called User Flows.

Figure 1: Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK-enabled Application User Flow Analytics

In these user flows, additional data points are collected for these actions such as the completion state, start & stop time, active time, breadcrumbs, as well as device metadata. These data points are highly valuable to monitor the application performance and to understand why any app failure or crash happens.

For Workspace ONE productivity applications, multiple user flows are already embedded. For example, in Workspace ONE Launcher, device check-in/check-out failure and time to home screen are tracked as a part of user flows. This allows organizations to monitor any anomaly related to frontline device CICO processes.

With the introduction of Advanced Device Telemetry in Workspace ONE SDK 24.1.0, additional data points can now be collected on the device level. These data points are:

• Battery Telemetry – This includes device state (plugged-in or on battery), discharge rates, charging failure, battery temperature, etc.
• Network Telemetry – This includes network connectivity type & frequency, network latency, signal strength, and jitters.
• Device Telemetry - This includes device storage, CPU utilization, and device location.

Figure 2: Device Network Telemetry Dashboard

These telemetries allow organizations to collect additional data beyond app-level telemetry to have a more detailed understanding of the factors impacting device performance and user experience, allowing them to take proactive actions to mitigate any challenge in the field before it interrupts business continuity.

The main benefit of using Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK data points to collect device telemetry is the data collection frequency. With Workspace ONE UEM’s traditional data sampling, data is collected typically every 4 hours. With Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK, however, the data sampling rate is targeted to be collected every 10 minutes. Therefore, Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK can provide a more near real-time status of the devices.

If the IT organizations are not leveraging any internally developed apps, these data points are now available with Workspace ONE Launcher 24.02 and above by default, so this is ideal for any frontline device use cases leveraging Android devices with Workspace ONE Launcher.

More details on the Advanced Device Telemetry can be found in the blog post and the release note below:

• Enabling Advanced Device Telemetry for mobile devices through Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK
• Workspace ONE Intelligence 24.04.08 Release Notes

Leveraging Telemetry for Different End-User Personas

Device and app telemetry collected from Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK can be utilized in different manners. For frontline device use cases, IT organizations can use these data to track device and application usage and health. Here are some examples of how organizations can leverage telemetry from Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK in the frontline use cases:

• Using battery telemetry, collect the device battery state to see if a battery replacement is needed.
• Using device telemetry, gather device location to ensure the devices are not stolen and proactively notify field technicians if devices are outside of the specified area.
• Using device network and app telemetry, identify different latencies, ranging from poor device network, slow check-in/check-out time, to lagging application load to help with poor performance troubleshooting.
• Using battery telemetry, send user notifications to charge devices if a battery level is low to prevent device loss.

In the case of corporate & BYOD users, the telemetry can be used differently with a focus on the application level. Here are some examples of app-level telemetry organizations can leverage:

• Using application crash data rate, the IT help desk team can be alerted when the crash rate goes beyond a specified threshold so that the issue can be further investigated. 
• Using data from user flow, app developers can see which actions are taking a long time to complete or which actions are not being used, allowing them to optimize the application to enhance the end-user experience.
• Using data from user flow, app developers can leverage breadcrumbs to troubleshoot issues when user flows are failing.

Integration Process for Internally Developed Apps

Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK is a remarkably simple, lightweight solution to integrate. It also plays nice with other SDKs and integrates with just a few lines of code.

Figure 3: Getting the App ID from Workspace ONE Intelligence

Here is what it might look like in your code. For Android, after adding the SDK to your build.gradle file and additional user permission, you can initialize the SDK very easily with a line at the beginning of your onCreate() in your AndroidManifest.xml file.

Figure 4: Just two lines of code added to the app’s MainActivity file (Android)

More documentation on integrating internally developed applications can be found in our product documentation: Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK Data for Apps.

Visualizing & Monitoring Mobile App Experience

Once applications are integrated with Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK and registered, the application will periodically send out SDK samples to Workspace ONE Intelligence. These data can then be generated via Workspace ONE Intelligence report or visualized via dashboards.

At an aggregate level, a built-in dashboard is available to provide an overview of the mobile app experience for iOS and Android. This built-in dashboard can be found under Experience Management > Experience Score > Mobile Apps. The dashboard contains a summary and experience score for each application integrated with Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK.

Figure 5: Mobile App Experience Dashboard

By clicking each app, specifics on the application can be drilled down further to see historical trends with version breakdown, along with different contributors to the experience score such as network errors or application crashes.

Figure 6: Application-Specific Mobile App Experience Dashboard

Clicking each contributor will navigate to a different page where the information about each contributor can be further investigated.

Figure 7: Application Crash Historical Trend Dashboard

Note that a quick search on the search bar would also bring up a specific app. 

Figure 8: Using search functionality to look up SDK enabled applications

After the application is pulled up, app-level telemetry will then be shown, from basic information such as app adoption (daily and monthly active users), and install trends, to information around user flows, experience score, network insights, and crashes. Screenshots below highlight a few dashboards and data points available for Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK apps. For more information, see Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK capabilities.

Figure 9: Mobile Application Overview Dashboard showing app adoption statistics

Figure 10: Mobile Application Experience Score Dashboard

Figure 11: Mobile Application User Flow Dashboard

For device telemetry, custom dashboards can also be created to collect device-level data like battery and network performance. A few examples of those dashboards are shown here:

Figure 12: Device Telemetry Dashboard showing battery statistics

Figure 13: Device Telemetry Dashboard showing device network statistics

Creating Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator Workflows with Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK Data

Aside from visualizing and monitoring device and app telemetry, actions can also be taken based on the collected data using Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator. Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator can create workflows, that are triggered in response to certain criteria being met. Once they are triggered, actions such as sending notifications to users or help desk teams, creating support tickets, or remediation actions will be executed automatically.

Here are a few examples of Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator workflows leveraging Intelligence SDK data.

Example 1 – App Crash Rate Increase Alert

Figure 14: Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator workflow to alert the help desk team if the application crash rate goes beyond 5%

This workflow will proactively send out Slack messages to the #helpdesk Slack channel and a ServiceNow incident is created for investigation when Workspace ONE Intelligence identifies any Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK-enabled applications with a crash rate above 5% in a four-hour span. This proactively informs the help desk team to further investigate and find a workaround for the users.

Example 2 – User Flow Average Completion Time Increase Alert

Figure 15: Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator workflow to alert the app developer team if the average app load time takes longer than 30 seconds

This workflow will proactively create a ServiceNow incident if it detects that the average application load time goes beyond 30 seconds in the four-hour span. This will alert the helpdesk team of a potential performance degradation in the environment given that the average load time is higher than normal.

Example 3 – Device Lost (Low Battery) Alert

Figure 16: Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator workflow to send Slack message to the help desk team with current device location if the battery level is less than 5%

This workflow will proactively send out a Slack notification alerting the #helpdesk channel when devices are detected to have a battery less than 5% and unplugged with the current user information and its last known location in case devices are not reporting back the information again.

Example 4 – Device Lost (Outside Specified Location) Alert

Figure 17: Workspace ONE Intelligence Freestyle Orchestrator workflow to execute a series of actions if devices are outside of specified longitude & latitude

If devices are at risk of being lost (outside of a specified location), this workflow will proactively send a lock command, create an incident in ServiceNow, send out emails to the help desk team, and enable data roaming on the devices.

Summary

In conclusion, the advanced capabilities of the Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK significantly enhance IT organizations' ability to monitor and improve user experience and device performance. By collecting comprehensive telemetry data at both the application and device levels, organizations can gain valuable insights into user interactions, identify and resolve potential issues proactively, and ensure seamless operation of critical business applications. The integration process is straightforward, and the rich data collected can be visualized through intuitive dashboards or used to trigger automated workflows for timely interventions. As workplace dynamics continue to evolve, leveraging tools like Workspace ONE Intelligence SDK will be pivotal in maintaining high levels of productivity and user satisfaction across various end-user personas and device environments.