---
title: "How Critical Applications Are Determined"
slug: "understand-how-critical-applications-are-determined"
updated: 2026-10-20T16:16:01Z
published: 2026-10-20T16:16:01Z
canonical: "documentation.lakesidesoftware.com/understand-how-critical-applications-are-determined"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://documentation.lakesidesoftware.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How Critical Applications Are Determined

This video explains how to use Personas to understand how critical applications are determined.

[vimeo-player](https://player.vimeo.com/video/917110773?h=54f4c0b4a7)

## Video Transcript

To better understand what our different persona groups are doing during the workday, we can check out the Persona Critical Applications observation, which lets us see how many applications are being used that take up at least 5% of active time on average.

This information is very powerful for image planning. What applications are vital for employees to handle their day-to-day workloads?

We are looking by persona, so we can see how many critical applications each persona has out of the total number of applications they are using. This is calculated from the number of users in that persona over the amount of days that they have been reviewed by SysTrack.

If we want to see what those critical applications are, we can click on the value and get a pop-up window that shows each application, how many users in that persona access it and the percentage of their access, how many total hours the application was used by that persona, the average daily usage, and what percentage of the persona's collective time was spent with this application in focus.

We can also see average consumption for each application for that persona, as well as application start information.

If we want to see what other, less critical applications are being used, we can click that value in the Number of Applications column to see more details.

The User Critical Applications screen gives us that same information, but this time by user. This information is ideal for when we have to replace a system and need to get users up and running as quickly as possible.

Whether we're installing software on a new desktop or creating a new image, we can easily see the mission-critical applications that users need to do their jobs.

Each user has applications that they would say they absolutely must have, but this data shows what they truly cannot live without.

We can use this data to ask which users have the most critical applications, what those applications are, and what percentage of their time is spent using them.