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Desktop Discovery - capture it all
Desktop Discovery - capture it all

Are you struggling getting a full view of desktop applications, maybe Viio's Desktop Agent is the answer to your problem.

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Written by Marta Droneva
Updated over a week ago

Full discovery of all desktop applications

SaaS Discovery is much more than what happens in the browser. Some of the most expensive applications are running directly on your employees' desktops and, as such, captured by a browser extension.

Viio Desktop Agent uncovers all applications running locally, helping you to gain complete control of your SaaS stack. This includes in-depth insights into usage patterns on, e.g., the full Adobe Creative Suite and any other application used.

How to get started

The Viio Agent can be installed on employee computers. The agent is based on osquery – an open-source project maintained and vetted by the Linux Foundation. osquery was initially developed at Facebook and still runs across Facebook’s fleet of employee laptops and servers.

Note! You will need to run a particular command if you want to use a centralized rollout on your employees' computers. This will download the latest version of the Agent and connect it to your Viio client properly.

MacOS support:

VIIO_CUSTOMER_KEY="YOUR_CUSTOMER_KEY" VIIO_EMPLOYEE_EMAIL="SPECIFY_EMPLOYEE_EMAIL_HERE" bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/viio-io/agent-installer-scripts/main/macos.install.sh)"

This is especially useful if your MDM can define the email of the employee device as a parameter, making the mapping to the Viio employee (connected from your AD) happen seamlessly.

Windows support:

msiexec /l*v viio.log /i 'Viio_Desktop_Agent_Installer.msi' /passive /qn VIIO_CUSTOMER_KEY=YOUR_CUSTOMER_KEY VIIO_EMPLOYEE_EMAIL=EMAIL

To obtain your VIIO_CUSTOMER_KEY please reach out to your account manager or [email protected] for more info.

How to uninstall

Windows

  1. Go to your Control Panel -> Programs->Uninstall a program

  2. Search for Viio in the top-right corner

  3. Locate Viio and select Uninstall from the menu above

MacOS

sudo launchctl remove io.viio.agent.metalauncher 
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/io.viio.agent.metalauncher.plist
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/viio
sudo rm /etc/viio.conf

Troubleshooting

Once you install the agent on one or multiple devices and you believe the data is not flowing into Viio, please reach out to [email protected]

To accelerate the debugging process, please choose one device and have ready the contents of the configuration file. You can find these like so:

MacOS

sudo cat /etc/viio.conf 

Windows

C:\Program Files\Viio Desktop Agent\ conf.json

Also, please prepare the device name, device ID and employee whose device this is. This will greatly accelerate the process of figuring out Agent installation issues.

Under the hood

The Viio Agent is read-only, which means it will not change anything on your machines. It has limited functionality to read data.

Viio has selected a subset of the queries that OSquery provides that are relevant for application discovery and usage monitoring. These queries are published to your machines from Viio’s server. The installation process ensures that our server’s certificate is pinned; only our server is authorized to send or receive data from your machines.

We are making sure that we collect only absolutely needed information to support our Discovery and Usage model.

Once a process of a SaaS application is detected, we collect a unique device ID, date of visit and SaaS application itself to provide visual representation of this data in Viio App.

We never store any sensitive data never reaches Viio servers. Additional information can be found here.

Finally, if you have any concerns about the security of the Viio Agent, feel free to reach out to [email protected]!

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