Apps Freezing, Hanging or Crashing? Identify the Problems and Improve Your DEX!

The Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is a metric to determine the quality of an employee’s experience with technology. Something that can cause a poor experience is the applications and how they react as an employee is using them. Applications that are responsive are more enjoyable to use so lots of effort is usually spent on optimizing infrastructure to ensure a good application experience. Something that can jolt you out of a good experience is when an application freezes, hangs or crashes. Being able to detect which application causes these poor experiences can give companies the information they need to take action on improving or replacing these software solutions.

Identify application issues

With ControlUp for Desktops 2.15 we now track these events and can display them ‘in real-time’ in the Edge DX interface and track them historically in the data table. You can expose the visibility of the new data by editing the columns in and adding them to the display.

Add the columns to your view for real-time information

These columns show real-time data with the number of freezes, crashes and the like over the last 60 seconds.

Columns showing application performance statistics

Application hang, freeze or crash?

An application freeze occurs when the user interface becomes unresponsive. The ControlUp Edge agent will periodically ping the foreground application user interface to see if it responds. If it doesn’t then the application is considered “frozen” and gets categorized in the App Freezes column. Application not responding

If the application recovers and the user interface becomes responsive again, the amount of time it was frozen is displayed in the “App Freeze Seconds” column.

Microsoft Windows - application not responding — OS detected app hang

An application that becomes terminated by clicking the ‘Close the program’ button on the not responding dialog is categorized as a “App Hang”. Lastly, an application where the operating system terminates the process due to the app doing something unexpected is a “App Crash”. This occurs irrespective of user interaction.

Tracking application issues

The historical evidence of the application freezes, hangs and crashes are available in the win_event_log data table:

Create a custom report in the win_event_log table to track app freezes, hangs and crashes

Create a custom report with these details by clicking the “Create Custom Report” button and selecting the fields we want to report on: Custom Report Creator

After clicking ‘Save’ go back into the Report, ensure “Save Filters” is checked and then add “Application Frozen” to the event source filter and we can now see when applications were frozen, who experienced it and what devices it occurred on.

The saved custom report — Application hangs, freezes and crashes report

Applications that freeze, hang or crash are incredibly frustrating. They interrupt your flow of thoughts, can be jarring and having to get back to your last state can be time consuming. ControlUp provides the capabilities to understand what the employee’s in your organization are experiencing when they use the technology provided to them. You can see when an application was frozen, how long it was frozen, whether it recovered or crashed and more! To start getting these amazing insights into how your organization performs, sign up for a trial today!

Trentent Tye

Trentent Tye, a Tech Person of Interest, is based out of Canada and its many, many feet of snow. FUN FACT: Trentent came to ControlUp because, as a former customer, the product impacted his life in so many positive ways—from reducing stress, time to remediation, increased job satisfaction, and more—he had to be our evangelist. Now an integral part of ControlUp’s Product Marketing Team, he educates our customers, pours his heart and soul into the product, and generally makes ControlUp a better place. Trentent recently moved to be closer to family. He does not recommend moving during a pandemic.