Application Health Monitoring for Business, Productivity, and Security Applications

In today’s work-from-anywhere environment, IT and security practitioners need to balance end user experience with enforcing security policies to maintain their organization’s security posture. This is made more challenging by the inconsistent levels of device visibility and control that practitioners have over their largely remote device fleets. Adding to the complexity is the explosion in the number and types of applications adopted either as installed client-based applications or as Web application subscriptions.

On average, there are 67 applications installed on enterprise devices at any time. Despite this, uninterrupted access to business, productivity, file sharing, communications, Web conferencing, and other applications is essential for end users to remain productive. Furthermore, it is also critical for practitioners to ensure security applications such as anti-malware, anti-phishing, encryption, data loss prevention, and VPN apps are functioning as expected to protect the corporate network from external cyberthreats. 

Why Endpoint Applications Fail

Applications tend to fail on endpoints for a variety of reasons including:

• End users may negligently disable critical application components or intentionally uninstall the application entirely.
• Threat actors often disable core security applications as a first step in gaining and maintaining access to an organization’s corporate network.
• The installation of a third-party application may inadvertently collide with and/or disable components of another application installed on the device.
• Lastly, an application can either be incorrectly installed or not installed at all after a device reimage. 

As a result, IT and security teams require the means to accurately monitor the health of applications being used across their organization. In addition to knowing whether an application is installed and on what devices, details about whether the application is configured correctly and is running as expected across their devices is vital as well. When failures do occur, having access to specific reasons for the failure is necessary to bring the application back to a state of efficacy as soon as possible to reduce impact on end user productivity and the organization’s security posture. 

Absolute’s new and exciting capability called Absolute Application Health enables users to monitor the health of over 2,000 of the most used Windows and Mac applications across enterprise organizations. These include a variety of application categories such as anti-malware, anti-phishing, public file sharing, backup, browser, firewall, messenger, cloud storage, data loss prevention, patch management, VPN, virtual machine, health agent, remote desktop control, peer-to-peer agent, and Web conferencing. The feature offers integrated reports and widgets enabling users to monitor their installed applications by versions, assess application health, and obtain key failure reasons to aid with remediation efforts.  

Application Health is available to customers subscribed to eligible Absolute Resilience licenses. Users can configure and activate the feature through the “Installed Applications” policy under the “Policies” section of the Absolute Console. Once activated, application health information will be collected and populated as interactive reports and widgets through the Console. For more information about Absolute Application Health, check out the Absolute Resilience product page.