The moment any monitoring tool arrives in an office, one question follows it into every room: is this watching the computers, or watching us? DEX has a clear technical answer — but only if you roll it out honestly.
This page exists because the question is legitimate. DEX collects device and application experience telemetry: performance metrics, crash events, boot and logon times, battery health, device age. That is the whole diet. It does not record keystrokes, read files, capture screens or log which documents a person opened. But staff will not learn that from the software — they learn it from how you introduce it. Here is where the technical line sits, and the rollout rules that keep you on the right side of it.
👆 The line is the data type — performance of the machine versus behaviour of the person
Ask one question of any metric: does this describe the machine's health, or the person's behaviour? "This PC took four minutes to log on" is machine health. "This person opened a spreadsheet at 9:40" is behaviour. DEX stays on the machine side of that line — its pillars are performance, reliability, responsiveness and application stability. The moment a tool starts collecting content, keystrokes or screen images, you are no longer doing experience monitoring, and it needs a completely different justification, policy and conversation.
The one pillar that touches people directly is User Sentiment, gathered through feedback prompts (ManageEngine's Engage). Read it for what it is: an invited opinion, like a suggestion box with a scale. Use it in aggregate — "accounts rates their PCs 2 out of 5" — never as a per-person performance record, and never punish honesty in it, or the next round of answers will be worthless and the trust damage permanent.
Even machine data deserves respect. Experience dashboards reveal work patterns at the edges — when a PC boots, when it sleeps. Restrict console access to the IT staff who need it, keep the same leaver-removal discipline you apply to any admin system, and be careful with exports: a spreadsheet of every device's health is still internal data. Proportionality is a practice, not a paragraph — collect what improves the machines, keep it as long as trends need, and no longer.
Here is the simplest audit of your own rollout: could you project the DEX dashboard on the office wall without embarrassment? If yes, you are monitoring machines in the open. If the idea makes you uncomfortable, the discomfort is information — about scope, secrecy or purpose — and it should be resolved before the rollout, not after the first complaint. Tools like DEX, introduced honestly, usually end up defended by staff, because they are the ones who gain when the worst PCs finally get fixed.
Watch the video and note exactly which data the console displays — then write your own one-page staff notice from what you saw.
▶️ Watch Full VideoNo. DEX collects experience telemetry — performance metrics, system and application crashes, boot and logon times, battery health and device age. Keystroke logging, screen capture and content inspection are surveillance features that DEX does not include.
Boot and logon times exist in the data as machine metrics, and using them as attendance records would be a misuse of the tool's purpose. If your organisation wants attendance data, that is a separate, openly-declared system — not a side use of a health dashboard.
Yes — announced, explained and written into policy. Staff who understand that the tool measures machine health, and who see it fix the worst PCs first, generally support it. A silently discovered monitoring tool damages trust regardless of how innocent its data is.