8/8/2011 1 Workstation Performance Issues: Finding the Root Cause Presented by: Lee Guthrie Senior Sales Engineer, Aternity Inc. Lee Guthrie • Senior Sales Engineer at Aternity, a provider of End User Experience (EUE) Management software • Assists in architecting deplo ments for a broad • Assists in architecting deployments for a broad range of F500 organizations • Previously, Principal Solution Architect with HP (formerly Mercury Interactive) It’s All About the End User • Top 3 Challenges for Managing Application Performance • Lack of visibility into end user experience • Proactive problem detection before users call the help desk • Inability to measure business impact of application 74% of End User problems are not detected by IT. -FORRESTER REPORT ON “IT IS A BUSINESS RISK” “ ” 80% of IT desktop support “ performance related issues End user monitoring tools need to provide deep insight into end-user behavior and application usage patterns and provide performance base-lining to ensure IT service degradation is understood, analyzed, remediated and, in certain cases, avoided. -WILL CAPELLI, RESEARCH VICE PRESIDENT “ ” budgets are spent on identifying and resolving End User problems. -INTEL RESEARCH”
Transcript
8/8/2011
1
Workstation Performance Issues: Finding the Root Causeg
Presented by:Lee Guthrie
Senior Sales Engineer, Aternity Inc.
Lee Guthrie
• Senior Sales Engineer at Aternity, a provider of End User Experience (EUE) Management software
• Assists in architecting deplo ments for a broad • Assists in architecting deployments for a broad range of F500 organizations
• Previously, Principal Solution Architect with HP (formerly Mercury Interactive)
It’s All About the End User• Top 3 Challenges for Managing Application
Performance• Lack of visibility into end user experience• Proactive problem detection before users call the
help desk• Inability to measure business impact of application
74% of End User problems are not detected by IT.
- FORRESTER REPORT ON “IT IS A
BUSINESS RISK”
“ ”
80% of IT desktop support “performance related issues
End user monitoring tools need to provide deep insight into end-user behavior and application usage patterns and provide performance
base-lining to ensure IT service degradation is understood, analyzed, remediated and, in certain cases, avoided.
- WILL CAPELLI, RESEARCH VICE PRESIDENT
“”
p ppbudgets are spent on
identifying and resolving End User problems.-INTEL RESEARCH”
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The Visibility Gap
Network Infrastructure
Application Servers & Web
Servers
Databases & Middleware
Hosts & Application
Servers
Data Center Performance & AvailabilitySystem Monitoring, Cross Tier Transaction Management and
Real End User ExperienceCombines multiple data streams that separately describe different aspects of end user experience – providing an
integrated multidimensional portrait
Data Center Performance & AvailabilitySystem Monitoring, Cross Tier Transaction Management and
Capacity Planning Solutions
Application EcosystemEnd User
Internet/Intranet
Firewall
Presentation ServerCitrix or RDP
Application J2EE, Net etc.
Database Oracle, DB2 etc.New York
London
Sydney
MainframeWeb or Application Server
Desktops
Laptops
COMPLEX AND DISTRIBUTED IT ENVIRONMENTS
Today’s Law Firms
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Complex & Distributed IT • Legal industry is based on knowledge and
communications -- technology has dramatically changed the way law firms operate
• Legal document exchange and storage is shifting to electronic format
• Outsourcing and collaboration tools are becoming more prevalent -- an increasing number of lawyers are opting to work virtually
Physical and Virtual Desktops
• Powerful mobile devices, software-as-a service, and secure, web-based technology enable legal professionals to work from virtually anywhere
• As a result, firms need the ability to accurately d ti l th d l t measure and proactively manage the deployment,
adoption, and on-going use of mission-critical applications in both physical and virtual environments
PROACTIVE RESPONSE TO END USER APPLICATION ISSUES
User-Centric Proactive IT Management
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Reduce Business Disruptions
• Virtually all distributed law firms need comprehensive insight into the performance of each location and branch
Reduce Business Disruptions• With EUE aggregation and analysis capabilities, you
see the performance and productivity of each location, and also deviations in app response (e.g. Outlook Launch) across the entire enterprise
• Gain proactive notification when deviations (such as slower email response or slower document server) slower email response or slower document server) reach a critical level
• User-Centric Proactive IT Management triggers an immediate corrective action, often even before end users are even aware of any service disruption
Proactive Alerting • With EUE monitoring, a proactive alert is issued where a user in New York is
experiencing latency with Outlook Performance and Availability• It appears that no other users are experiencing the same issue
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Problem Isolation• With EUE monitoring, it is possible to determine if the issue is for a single
application or for everything running on the desktop• The Screen Shot below shows that although the user is currently running multiple
monitored applications, MS Outlook is the one experiencing the issues
Workflow & System Performance• Identifies activities user performing on his/her system prior to an issue -- generates
system metrics that were impacted• Screen Shot below shows that the user restarted his/her PC, logged back in at 10:43,
then ‘Launches’ MS Outlook’ resulting in a corresponding ‘Preview Mail’ at 10:46• Solid blue line represents the number of physical Mega Bytes of RAM available on the
PC over time -- As more apps are launched, the available number of bytes steadily declines
• A decline below 400MB of Available Physical Memory will impact app performance of memory-intensive applications as the OS begins paging out large instruction sets
System Configuration & Performance• The Screen Shot below shows that the average percent usage of the OS paging file vs.
the amount of configured memory on the local PC• Users with 1GB of configured RAM are currently paging out large portions of the
instructions which could be stored /executed in RAM if more was available• Each paged instruction set must be read back in before being executed which can result
2. Empirically, the root cause of the problem has been shown
3. Empirically, a hardware upgrade of memory can be justified
Resolving Slow Machine Boot / Logon
• With EUE monitoring, organizations can be alerted to machines that have the longest boot and logon times
• The Below Report excerpt shows a machine that took over 4 ½ minutes to logon
Logon Analysis• EUE monitoring identifies that 2 group policy downloads and 1 service invocation are
taking over 3 minutes• EUE provides the ability to instantly view what drivers are loaded, services are invoked,
group policies are downloaded/applied and how long each takes for the boot and logon sequence
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EUE Root Cause Analysis
Boot/Logon Performance Improvement
1. Ensure group policy settings are correct
2. Check if SMTP service is required -- disable if not
Service Disruption• EUE monitoring identifies blue screens, application crashes, and app hangs• Provides details of processes impacted down to the DLLs causing the issue
RETAINING HIGH APPLICATION SERVICE LEVELS
User-Centric Proactive IT Management
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App Service Level Compliance• Business App owners need to ensure that revenue-
generating apps are “always on,” while driving optimal service levels and lowering costs
• These stakeholders need real-time analytics and ti bl d t ti t d b i proactive problem detection to reduce business
disruptions and MTTR, and validate app performance by analyzing the exact business user experience
App Service Level Compliance• Law firms can gain this business insight via reports and
on-demand queries that reveal the true application performance metrics
App Service Level Compliance• Business Insight into Quality of Service by location,
department, CPU speed or any other category, identify the outliers and proactively initiate improvement projects
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MAINTAIN COMPETITIVE IT ENVIRONMENT
Today’s Law Firms
New Systems On-Demand• System Architects must implement new solutions for
new demands• Require ability to collect and analyze business flows
from the entire org and correlate them with i t l tt ib t h l ti b t environmental attributes such as location, subnet,
office etc, as well as with desktop attributes such as virtualization, CPU, memory and OS
New Systems On-Demand• System Architects can validate performance impact
and “before and after” usage patterns of new features
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New Systems On-Demand• EUE Platform can assist System Architects by
comparing the virtualized vs. physical workstation performance and measuring performance and usage of work-from-home users
ENSURE ROI ON PLANNED INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS
User-Centric Proactive IT Management
Ensuring ROI for IT Investments• From the CFO perspective, ensuring ROI on IT
investments and maintaining costs are critical for maintaining the financial health and well being of the firm
• Must have the Business Insight to enable Informed Capacity Planning based on empirical evidence that validates how proposed changes impact user performance and productivity
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Ensuring ROI for IT Investments• Real user monitoring can be used to reveal the actual
usage of licensed applications and optimize licensing across the entire enterprise
REAL-WORLD USE CASES FROM THE FRONTLINE
User-Centric Proactive IT Management
Improve End User Experience• An EUE-driven Health Check at Firm Resolves Chronic Issue
• End User Experience (EUE) Management Detection Engine consistently opened daily incidents about a DNS perf issue, with classification pointing to Boston VPN
• The issue was escalated to the Network team, further investigation revealed that all Boston VPN traffic was handled by an old router
• Acting on this insight, the old router was replaced and the issue resolved
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Increase User Productivity• End User Experience (EUE) Management Helps Firm Get Proactive on
Data Loss Prevention• The Firm installed a WMI monitor in order to collect disk health events• Using custom EUE charts pushed to relevant stakeholders on a daily basis, the
helpdesk team received on-going indication of disks about to go bad• Empowered by this accurate data, the firm initiated a new proactive support
procedure to fix these errors as they arise and greatly reduce data loss events
Decrease Business Disruptions• EUE Provides Critical Insight to Resolve a Virus Outbreak
• Multiple workstations were affected by a virus outbreak• Virus was a randomly generated process, with a unique nonsensical name• Leveraging the fact that their EUE Platform already collects process information
from all workstations – a report was generated by the EUE provider to identify workstations running processes that are different from the gold standard host, while identifying and listing those different processes
• Using this report, the firm immediately identified the infected workstations and was able to locate and fix the last four that were re-infecting the entire desktop environment
Drive Optimal User Productivity• EUE Helps Verify Impact of OST File Size on Outlook Performance
• IT team created a report to determine OST file sizes within their organization• From this report, they could not only identify users with large files, but also
analyze the impact of the OST size on Outlook performance• The results clearly revealed that users with large files were experiencing
significantly slower performance• Armed with this actionable data, the IT team was able to take concrete steps
and optimize the OST file size in order to ensure top end user productivity
