Scenarios for remote actions
Overview
The Nexthink Act product lets you execute remote actions on the devices of the end-users. Remote actions open up many possibilities for the prevention and remediation of issues encountered by the end-users as well as for gathering additional information from devices. A remote action is basically an executable script that can accept parameters and optionally return outputs to be stored in the Engine.
Depending on the purpose of a remote action and how it is triggered, Nexthink has identified four main scenarios or use cases for remote actions:
Assisted service
Self-help
Self-healing
On-demand data
In addition, the Nexthink Act product exposes an API to programmatically launch remote actions, extending their availability to third-party products, such as self-service portals or ticketing systems.
Applies to platforms | Windows | macOS |
Assisted Service
In the assisted service scenario, the goal is to help support teams provide assistance to end-users.
When support agents with access to the Finder receive an incident or detect an issue on a device, they may manually trigger an appropriate remote action to fix the issue. Support agents may trigger remote actions from:
The list of results of an investigation on devices or a category on devices.
Context menu on selected devices.
The Device view.
Context menu on the selected device.
Links to remote actions in the documentation of score tabs.
Administrators control who can trigger the remote actions by assigning them to roles. Only those Finder users who have the right to edit remote actions or who have a remote action included in the roles of their profile can manually trigger the execution of a remote action.
Self-help
In the self-help scenario, the goal is to help end-users solve issues by themselves, without necessarily requiring external intervention from support.
The self-help scenario requires the activation of the Nexthink Engage product, as it relies on campaigns to notify the end-users about the issues found and ask them to take action.
Define remote actions for self-help to be automatically triggered when a known issue is detected on the device of the end-user. Once triggered, the remote action is connected to a campaign that guides the end-user to the resolution of the issue. The remote action should take into account the responses of the end-user and act accordingly.
Depending on whether the script payload of a remote action requires administrative privileges or not, run the remote action for self-help:
In the context of the current interactive user, if the action requires no special privileges.
In the context of the local system account, if the action requires administrative privileges.
Self-healing
In the self-healing scenario, the goal is to fully automate the remediation of specific issues in the devices of the end-users while avoiding human intervention.
Define remote actions for self-healing to be automatically triggered when a known issue is detected on a device and execute a remediation script that does not need the interaction of the end-user. Carefully consider the frequency of execution of this kind of remote actions.
On-demand data
In the on-demand data scenario, the goal is to get additional data from devices and incorporate it into Nexthink.
Remote actions are scheduled to be periodically executed on the devices of interest to gather the additional information that Nexthink does not collect by default. This additional information is then accessible through both the Finder and NXQL.
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