ControlUp users focusing on digital employee experience (DEX) and user experience monitoring have found several features and best practices especially valuable for measuring adoption, engagement, and satisfaction across their environments. Key recommendations center around combining telemetry data with direct user feedback such as surveys to obtain richer insights. Surveys are most effective when paired with quantitative telemetry metrics, as this correlation reveals gaps and areas for improvement that neither approach alone can fully expose.
A primary metric endorsed by the community is the DEX Score, which aggregates user experience data into a single score per user, and can be rolled up by department, location, or persona. Trending DEX Scores over time provides a clear adoption and satisfaction narrative. In addition, monitoring logon duration per group is critical because delays here are a common source of user frustration and complaints.
For user experience visibility, the Employee View dashboard enables IT teams to quickly identify issues impacting end users. Other frequently cited dashboards include those focusing on Windows application crashes, app stability and performance, AI-driven apps and sites usage, and Teams/Unified Communications call quality—particularly important for organizations heavily reliant on Microsoft Teams. Anomaly detection using AI (Pulse AI) is recommended over static threshold alerts, as it can find unusual patterns proactively and even suggest or enact fixes via workflows.
Custom dashboards should be tailored to different stakeholders—executive views showing aggregated DEX by business units, operational views tracking logon times and resource usage, and user experience views combining app performance and user sentiment. In addition, creative use of automation workflows can significantly enhance support responsiveness. For example, a self-healing workflow can collect diagnostic data on machine issues, generate AI-driven recommendations, automatically open service tickets (e.g., in ServiceNow), and notify users with remedial steps before they contact helpdesk.
Integrations such as with ServiceNow enable automated ticket creation and remediation workflows that improve IT support efficiency and end-user communication. ControlUp roles can be customized to give access across teams (security, network, telephony) beyond just helpdesk functions, helping different groups leverage relevant telemetry.
New users of ControlUp are advised to start with free courses available at ControlUp Academy, followed by hands-on evaluation of dashboards in the Dashboard Gallery to understand available data and refine dashboards per organizational needs. Building out use cases and dashboards incrementally—starting with a few key metrics and expanding gradually—helps organizations avoid measurement overload and focus on actionable insights.
Finally, community insights emphasize ongoing management of user personas underpinning DEX Score segmentation, with approaches varying from manual updates to bulk imports depending on organizational scale.
Overall, a combined strategy using ControlUp’s telemetry, custom dashboards, integrations, AI-powered anomaly detection, and employee survey data provides a powerful framework for measuring and improving employee experience in IT environments.
Relevant resources include:
ControlUp Academy: https://cuacademy.controlup.com
ControlUp official documentation: https://docs.controlup.com
ControlUp Community: https://community.controlup.com
Dashboard Gallery (within ControlUp platform)
Read the entire ‘Maximizing Employee Experience Insights with ControlUp: Key Features, Metrics, and Best Practices’ thread below:
Hi everyone! I’m fairly new to ControlUp, and our organization is currently in the later stages of implementation. My focus is on the user experience side of the platform rather than endpoint monitoring, so I’d appreciate learning from others who are using ControlUp in this way.
I’ve already deployed a survey in ControlUp, and I believe the License Usage feature could help measure adoption as we get our apps set up. What else should I be using or looking at?
I’d especially welcome suggestions for:
• Features or dashboards that provide insight into user experience
• Ways to measure adoption, engagement, and satisfaction
• Useful metrics, reports, or alerts
• Creative use cases or custom dashboards
• Integrations or complementary tools
• Lessons learned from similar initiatives
If you’re using ControlUp from an employee experience perspective, what would you recommend?
Hey and welcome at ControlUp Community.
In your case I would suggest to take the courses freely available at ControlUp Academy first.
I guess most of the topics are covered there.
Otherwise there was a chance to book “office hours” with.
She is an amazing knowledgeable source when it comes to the ControlUp products.
Then it comes to Dashboards I do like the Windows Application Crashes Dashboards and the WIndows App Stability and Performance Dashboard.
If AI is a thing in your company then absolutely go with the AI apps and Sites usage Dashboard.
For user experience I think the easiest way will be the Employees View where you can easily see whats wrong (or right) in your environment.
Pulse AI can also help you find oddities in your environment and can solve issues by itself!
In Events you can also define and find anomalies quite easy.
Last but not least you can fire all that questions into “AI Assistant”.
Keep us posted!
Hi Amy,
welcome to the ControlUp Community side of things
Academy is the best starting point, even for learning usecases but here is my take in addition to very sharp points.
• You’re already on the right track with surveys. The piece that makes it click is pairing what users tell you with what the telemetry shows. That gap is where the real insight sits.
• A few things I’d point you at:
◦ DEX Score: your headline EX metric. One number per user, rolled up by department, location or persona. Trend it over time and that is your adoption and satisfaction story in a single view, far more than License Usage on its own.
◦ Logon duration: the number one thing users actually complain about. Track it per group and you catch dissatisfaction before the survey does.
◦ ControlUp for Apps / SaaS visibility: shows which apps people really use and how they perform. Good adoption signal, and it tells you where to spend effort.
◦ UCC / Teams call quality: if your users live in Teams, call quality is a big EX driver. Bad meetings, unhappy people. Easy to miss, easy to put on a dashboard.
◦ On custom dashboards, build one per audience, not one giant board. An exec view (DEX Score by business unit), an ops view (logon, crashes, resource pressure), and a UX view (app performance with sentiment next to the telemetry). Each one stays readable that way.
◦ If feasible with your license, use Anomaly detection instead of Static thresholds
◦ Don’t underestimate the POWER (yes, needs to ve uppercase:grin:) of Workflows!! Connect your Ticketsystem to enrich the tickets with AI and ControlUp Data
One lessonI learned the hard way: don’t measure everything on day one. Pick a baseline, two or three segments, and watch the DEX Score move. Then widen. The survey-to-telemetry correlation is worth more than another twenty widgets.
Happy to share a couple of dashboard exports if that helps.
So much is possible
P.S. A few builds from my side, in case the ideas are useful to borrow:
• A self-healing Workflow: an alert fires on a struggling device, it collects CPU, services and running processes, an AI step writes a first-pass diagnosis and a fix suggestion, raises the ServiceNow ticket automatically, then pops a message to the user with the top three processes worth closing. Closes the loop before they even call the helpdesk.
• A VDI “big screen” dashboard split by company and by user: online time, app usage and machine health on one wall. Good for an at-a-glance EX read across tenants.
• Check the Script library for Disk Cleanup with prompt, it will let the user choose what to free up
• SSD health as a custom index, fed by a small collector script. Catches a dying disk before it ruins someone’s Monday.
Happy to send the exports or the Workflow JSON if any of those land.
I’d definitely recommend starting with the Dashboard Gallery. Take a look at the prebuilt dashboards to get a feel for what data is available out of the box and what a refined dashboard can look like. From there, copy one and start experimenting with the indexes, data, and visualizations. The platform collects so much information that you’re bound to find something useful or interesting for your organization.
The ServiceNow integration is another big one for us. It’s helped us become much more proactive with support. We can have an alert automatically generate a ticket, kick off remediation (or enable us to review manual remediation), and notify the user that IT is already aware of the issue and working on it, all before they even report the problem.
Like others have said, the ControlUp academy is a great starting point for members of your team to showcase features without needing to create internal KBs – ControlUp already did the heavy lifting for that.
Another thing to mention is that ControlUp isn’t just a remoting tool for Service Desk. You can create custom Roles within the product and provide access to your security team, network team, telephony, etc. It compliments a lot of their unique tools and the feedback from my organization members is that it has made their lives easier.
Outside of that, posting in the community is also a great way to get collective feedback and to brainstorm challenges. I’d be happy to provide my dashboard JSON or some detailed info on my configurations if it would help.
Hi
I’ll echo what was already shared
If you are focused on the user (employee) experience
Check out the employee view
dashboard that I’ll recommend is the DEX Score
App crashes
The teams dashboards, they all in the gallery
And welcome
Welcome to the community and I see there has been a bunch of great advice. The company I work for is a managed services provider so we utilize ControlUp specifically for monitoring our end user’s experience quite a lot. We include it as part of our service. I do not work in those dashboards etc. as I am more on the NetScaler side of the house but my colleague works there all the time and she is very helpful and knowledgeable. Feel free to ask her any questions you have.
Thank you all for the warm welcome and for the thoughtful recommendations! I’ve received a ton of great ideas from this thread, and I really appreciate everyone taking the time to share your experiences.
A few follow-ups based on the suggestions:
• We’re working toward integrating ControlUp with our help desk platform, but we’re not quite there yet. Several of you mentioned ServiceNow and automated ticketing/workflow scenarios, and I’m expecting that integration will unlock a lot of valuable insights and opportunities for us once it’s in place.
• For those of you using DEX Score by department, location, or persona, how are you managing personas and keeping them current over time? Are you bulk loading them from another source, maintaining them manually, or assigning them one-by-one within ControlUp? I’d love to understand what has worked well and what is sustainable at scale.
• I have completed a number of the ControlUp Academy courses already, and they’ve been very helpful in getting up to speed. I’ll definitely continue working through additional content and exploring some of the areas you all highlighted.
• I’m also curious how you’re using surveys in your day-to-day environments. I understand the concept from the Academy courses of using surveys to validate or provide context to what the telemetry is telling us, but I’d love to hear real-world examples. Are you triggering surveys after specific events, application issues, or performance degradations? How are you using employee feedback to confirm, challenge, or enrich what ControlUp is reporting?
Based on your feedback, I’m planning to spend more time with the Employee View, DEX Score, Dashboard Gallery, application usage insights, and some of the Teams/UCC dashboards. The suggestions around correlating survey results with telemetry were especially valuable and align closely with what we’re hoping to accomplish from an employee experience perspective.
Thanks again for all the guidance. This community has been incredibly helpful, and I’m looking forward to learning more as our implementation continues.
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