Item: Nexthink
Rating: 10
Author: Henry Jennings

Overall Satisfaction with Nexthink

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Nexthink is the leading user experience tool in our toolbox for our company. It has been instrumental in moving our workloads from a reactive to a proactive support model. It has enabled our L1 and L2 teams to quickly assess, troubleshoot, and repair issues with endpoints without interrupting the customer during the day.

We leverage Nexthink on both Windows and macOS devices to gather information that is not immediately ready on other toolsets that manage the desktop. Nexthink also allows our teams to see patterns and collect long term trending to make informed decisions regarding purchases, end of life hardware and products, and roadmap timelines for implementing new technology.

Nexthink has made itself critical to our business functions and we are very much looking forward to the next generation of functionality that is on the horizon.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Visualize endpoint experience with setting thresholds on CPU, RAM, free space, etc.
Flexible "remote actions" allow for gathering data that's not in the default data set AND send remote repairs without interrupting the customer.
Nexthink has a feature called 'Engage' which allows for interaction with the customer in the form of a survey, or a pop-up interaction that can be attached to a remote action.
Nexthink's Experience Portal allows for long term strategizing based on data points you can customize or create. Focus on the issues that are relative to your business and make decisions based on collected evidence.
Nexthink has real-time service monitoring from an endpoint perspective. You can discover if a section or entirety of your business is experiencing an outage with an online service in near real time.

Cons

The legacy account administration functions could use a little more attention. Simple things like exporting your account list should be an option for admins to do.
Update the tagging system for deciding which clients receive the Collector (agent) auto-update
Online visualization map of how investigations, scorecards, metrics, and remote actions are linked together.

Most Important Features

Visibility to the customer experience
Ability to remediate remotely and the ability to 'shift left' workflows or automate them entirely.
Long term metrics so we can see where we have issues and the ability to see if the changes we make are effective over time.
Consistent addition of new functionality to deal with the constantly changing environment.

Return on Investment

We consistently are able to prove out the ROI on Nexthink. Easy wins like automated disk cleanups, hardware refresh strategies, and agent health remediation were easy to reconcile.
As we move forward and Nexthink enhances it's technology, we're looking to integrate Nexthink into so many more business technologies (e.g. ServiceNow, Splunk, etc.) to maximize abilities to correlate data.
Nexthink's Engage campaigns are helpful in gathering user experience sentiment so we know if the choices we make are having the impact on customers that we desire.

Alternatives Considered

We leveraged several off the shelf performance tools prior to engaging with Nexthink (Windows Performance Toolkit, PCMark, etc.). Once we did our proof of concept with Nexthink, we knew we'd found the right tool for our organization.

Key Insights

Do you think Nexthink delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Nexthink's feature set?

Yes

Did Nexthink live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Nexthink go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Nexthink again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Microsoft Intune + SCCM), Jamf Pro

Likelihood to Recommend

I've been managing desktops for 20+ years and Nexthink was the missing tool out of my toolbox. Just to give some perspective, if you were building and maintaining a house, Nexthink would be comparable to switching up from a hammer and nails and to full blown using a nailgun. Nexthink is a solution accelerator and a well thought out toolset to give you the customer experience at a glance.

It allows for so much more visibility just with the default set of data points the Collector (agent) gathers, which is A LOT, and grants you the ability to gather even more data with remote actions. All of this evidence cuts how the "it could possibly be this" and "maybe it's that" discussions when you're troubleshooting an issue. It may not provide the exact answer all the time, but it gives you a "compass point" on where you need to start looking to resolve the issue. Also the service monitoring, activity monitoring, and critical event thresholds really empower the teams to know when a problem is happening and they can get ahead of it before the first call even reaches the Help Desk.

Nexthink is a cornerstone tool in our environment for end user experience and I'm excited to see where the go next.

Comments

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Nexthink - it's one of those tools that immediately shows it's value to your IT Customer Service branch