SysTrack Use Case: What’s Impacting My System?

One of SysTrack’s many uses includes providing insight on negative sources of impact in an end user’s environment. Specifically, it can be used by an IT administrator to find out what the source of issues are that cause user experience problems. This helps the IT organization find underlying causes for common user complaints like “my system is running slow” or “I just can’t open my email!” Because there are numerous reasons a system could be having issues, it can be difficult for an IT administrator to know where to start.

Let’s take a concrete example with a user that calls into the help desk with a generic complaint. The IT administrator receives a complaint from a user who says his system is running too slow. The administrator begins by targeting the user’s system in SysTrack Resolve. They start searching for the user in the General: Change Focus tab and selecting the appropriate system. The user can potentially have multiple systems, however, the online system is most relevant because it’s the system they are currently using.

The administrator continues on to Analytics Overview, where they notice some applications and events in critical state. However, due to the immense amount of time that has passed since they were stated as critical, they can be reasonably ignored for this situation. The administrator decides to check the health of the system under the Health tab of Resolve because it will provide a summary on any source of impact on the system. They notice the Total Impact graph (displayed below) in the summary section highlighting how many minutes of impact each category has on this system.

The administrator takes note that the network category has the highest total impact on the system but they decide to continue to look at the Quality Trend graph. It displays the quality of the environment per day compared with the average quality. This allows them to be able to see how the system was performing for the end user compared to how it performs on most days. They notice that it begins to go towards a downward trend on the day that the user started to notice the poor performance.

The administrator notices that the network seems to have the highest total impact overall, but decides to check out the daily impact chart to see the day that the user started noticing a slower performance. As displayed below, the administrator notices that the day the user started noticing a poor performance shows a high network impact and continues to show a high network impact.

The administrator now knows the source of what is causing the largest impact in the user’s system and can use that knowledge to fix the decreasing quality of the user’s system and the environment overall. They continue further into Resolve’s Black Box and looks closer at the network system data. They choose to switch the filter in the System Data panel from System to Network since this is the category they are most concerned with (displayed below). This reveals further details on the network interface cards such as a high retransmit rate resulting in the large network impact.

The IT administrator discovered the source of the impact for that specific user, but is wondering if other users are also having this same problem. They dive into Visualizer Enterprise and look at the health for the overall environment. The health appears to have good user experience across the board and the administrator concludes that this situation was only applicable to that one user. Finding the largest source of impact for an environment is just one of SysTrack’s many uses to promote a successful environment.