ControlUp has long been the industry standard for fixing slow logons in Citrix-, VMware Horizon, and AVD-based environments. But did you know that you can also speed up logons on Windows-, macOS-, and Linux-based endpoint devices, using ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps? It’s true!

On a day-to-day basis, nothing—NOTHING—aggravates me more than a slow logon. I find it absolutely maddening to sit and wait for a Windows system to boot up. For some users, it’s only a nuisance; maybe they’ll go get a cup of coffee or two and check the news on their phone while waiting to get to work. But not everyone has the benefit of waiting around, killing time before they get started. Think of people, for example, who work in critical positions like healthcare, where they need their systems STAT (medical jargon that means “on-the-double”)! The reality is that if they can’t access their systems instantly, patient outcomes can suffer.

My colleague, Trentent Tye, has spent a lot of time investigating this topic and has written and posted several articles and videos about using the ControlUp Real-Time console to analyze logon duration. But this isn’t the only way. In this article, I want to share a different method for discovering the root cause: ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps.

ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps is a solution designed to help with monitoring, troubleshooting, understanding, and improving the digital employee experience for people using Windows-, macOS-, and Linux-based physical endpoints. Not only does ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps capture and display metrics in real time, it also captures the processes and events that take place when a user logs on. This information allows IT to easily identify slow logons and their root causes.

Of course, not all users are forthcoming about having logon problems. Maybe they’re just too busy, maybe they don’t feel like calling the help desk, maybe they’ve simply become accustomed to the long wait to the point that they don’t give it much thought. Fortunately, ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps makes it easy to identify these users in order to proactively resolve issues that affect their logon duration. 

Users with slow logon times can be identified from the main dashboard by selecting User Logon Duration from the drop-down menu on the map widget.

Users—or groups of users—with lengthy logon times are displayed in red.

Alternatively, you can use the devices dashboard, which has a column that includes a graph of logon times that can be sorted to identify users with the longest duration.

You can get even more information by clicking the to bring up the Logons and User Sessions report. 

From a logon duration standpoint, the columns that are most useful are Logon Time, Profile – Load, and GPO Time. By custom-sorting these columns, you can easily identify your trouble spots.

Now, we’re getting to where ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps really shines. To help you dive down into the root cause of slow logon issues, check out the Logon Details column at the far right of the dashboard.

If you click on a magnifying glass icon, you will find a timeline of all the processes that took place during a user’s logon. Hovering over an event will display more information about that process, including its name and duration.

Clicking the Session Chart icon will display a chart showing a time chart of the processes.

Clicking the Session Processes icon will display a tabulated grid of the same information.

Using this information, you can understand the reasons for users’ poor logon experience and begin to remediate their issues (and also quell their frustrations).

In one case, the logon duration for a large group of users was decreased from over four minutes to a little over 30 seconds after identifying an issue with GPOs. In another case, more than three minutes were shaved off the logon time after an issue with WMI was identified and corrected!

Slow logon times can negatively impact the digital user experience. Fortunately, by using ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps, you can quickly identify the users who are suffering this fate and then identify the root cause of the problem. 

For information on analyzing slow logons, be sure to read the other blogs Trentent has written. For more information on ControlUp for Physical Endpoints & Apps, be sure to read some of our other blogs and articles, or simply reach out to our sales team to schedule a demo and see how, in less than 10 minutes, you can start monitoring Windows, Linux and macOS in your environment and reduce your users’ logon times.

Tom Fenton

Tom Fenton is a Technical Marketing manager here at ControlUp (in addition to an all-around great guy). He’s THE subject matter expert for Edge DX, our physical endpoint monitoring solution, as well as an expert in all things VMware (FACT: he used to work at VMware, teaching their employees about their technology). He creates valuable, educational content for the ControlUp blog, leads deep-dive webinars, and educates our sales teams and other IT professionals with tips and tricks about how to use ControlUp solutions. In his spare time, he writes for StorageReview.com and Virtualization Review magazine, and enjoys outdoor sports in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with him on Twitter @vDoppler.