Getting started with Application Persistence policies

NOTE  Depending on the Absolute product licenses associated with your account, Application Persistence policies may not be available.

Your organization depends on a multitude of software applications to complete the critical business processes required in your day-to-day operations. Many of these applications are deployed to your fleet of devices with limited access to tools that ensure that the devices are secure and comply with your organization's defined policies. Over time, these critical applications may become non-functional or non-compliant without your knowledge, potentially exposing your organization to data breaches, regulatory non-compliance, and a loss of employee productivity.

In Absolute, administrators can activate Application Persistence policies to help validate and maintain the resiliency of critical third party applications in the following ways:

  • Report on the functional status of the application's essential components
  • Determine if the device is compliant by comparing the current state of the application with the desired state (as defined in the Application Persistence policy configurations)
  • Repair components that are non-functional or non-compliant (for most applications, requires Absolute Resilience license)
  • Reinstall the application if it can't be repaired or is no longer installed (for most applications, requires Absolute Resilience license)

NOTE  For more information about Application Persistence™, visit the Learning Hub. To access the Learning Hub, click on the quick access toolbar and then click Resources > Learning Hub.

You can activate Application Persistence policies on devices running a supported version of the Windows operating system. To see information about third party applications in the console, each device's Absolute agent must be regularly connecting to the Absolute Monitoring Center.

The Application Persistence (RAR) component A lightweight software component of the Absolute agent that detects the status of third party applications installed on a device. The component may also attempt to repair the third party application if it is non-compliant. The RAR component is deployed on a device only when the device is associated with a customized policy group and that policy group's Application Persistence policy is activated. of the Absolute agent is responsible for collecting status information about third party agents, clients, services, and drivers installed on your devices.

When you activate an Application Persistence policy, the RAR component is activated on each device after the next successful agent connection to the Absolute Monitoring Center. Going forward, the component checks the status of the application every 15 minutes or 6 hours (depending on the application). If the device is online, results are uploaded to the database using a secure connection. The upload occurs every 6 hours or every 24 hours (depending on the application). An additional upload occurs immediately if an application's health status changes.

You can activate the Application Persistence policy to enable the RAR component to report on the functional status and compliance of the third-party applications supported in the current release.

If the RAR component determines that the application is non-functional or non-compliant and the Absolute Resilience license is associated with the policy group, the component can be configured to attempt to repair, or in some cases reinstall, the application.

By default, the Global Policy Group includes a preconfigured Application Persistence policy, which is set to Inactive. Although you can activate the policy in the Global Policy Group, best practice is to create custom policy groups, then configure and activate each policy group's Application Persistence policy, as required.

After you activate an Application Persistence policy, the agent begins to collect third party application status information from the devices associated with the applicable policy group. After you've allowed a day for the policy to be deployed and run on each Windows device, you can view the collected status information in the Application Persistence report and the Application Persistence Events report.

After you activate an Application Persistence policy, you can see summarized information about your persisted applications in the Application Health widget and the Repairs and Reinstalls widget on the Dashboard.