What it is
DEX is the measurement half of the digital workplace. Devices, applications and connections report data continuously.
What it measures
CPU and memory load, free disk, battery health, how often a machine restarts, application crashes, logon duration, network quality and VPN failures. Grouped by device model, operating system version, application version, location or department, they become a pattern.
Grouping and patterns
If logons on one notebook model are slow for many people, grouping by model shows it, and the cause can be fixed once for all of them. After a rollout, the same grouping shows whether anything got better, and by how much.
What it does about it
Two things, and both reduce the number of tickets. Automatic remediation handles the cases with a known fix: run a cleanup when the disk fills, reinstall or update an application version that is crashing, restart a service that has stopped. Self-service gives the same repertoire to the person at the keyboard, so reinstalling an application or refreshing a VPN profile does not need a ticket at all.
What to watch
The interesting number is the drift: logons that have lengthened by four seconds a month, a battery cohort ageing faster than the others, a driver that has started failing on one hardware generation. Seeing them needs somebody reviewing the data regularly.