Resolving VPN Issues Without Manual Intervention: Qualcomm Incorporated and Nexthink Flow
VPN issues are easily some of the most common digital workplace problems to plague end user computing (EUC) teams. When the VPN crashes or falls out of compliance, it can have a disproportionate impact on employee productivity.
Monitoring and managing VPN performance is a top priority for many of our customers – including Qualcomm Incorporated. Qualcomm Incorporated had a known VPN issue taking place in their environment impacting 90% of their workforce. For two years, they’d managed the issue with manual interventions – but users still ran into issues and submitted tickets.
Using Nexthink Flow, the EUC team at Qualcomm Incorporated found a new way to address the issue once and for all. Read on to learn how the team eliminated the VPN issue using Flow’s orchestration engine and automated workflows.
Understanding the VPN Issue
The issue stemmed from the setup of the software. Their VPN had two components: a machine tunnel VPN which connected to their foundational services network, keeping patching up to date and allowing users to change passwords when working; and the client portion of the VPN which allowed users to access the network when working remotely.
The issue originated when a bug in software prevented the machine tunnel VPN from updating when the client VPN would update – causing the two versions to fall out of sync. This in turn caused a range of other issues like application crashes and users blocked from accessing the network.
Given the prominence of the VPN software, this versioning sync issue impacted 90% of their workforce. Patching updates failed to deploy and because VPN is required for password resets, users couldn’t reset their own passwords. This issue impacted employee experience, compliance, security and ultimately business productivity.
Qualcomm Incorporated’s EUC team couldn’t use SCCM to deploy these fixes because SCCM requires a connection to the main network. As a result, the team could only use manual interventions to fix the VPN sync issues when they arose.
Then they tried Nexthink Flow.
Eliminating Manual Problem Solving with Nexthink Flow
With Flow, the EUC team easily built out a workflow. “Flow is much easier to read through than a long PowerShell script because the validation of logic is more visual with Flow. It’s easy to make a change. It is much easier to modify than going back and rescripting and revalidating that script,” said Chris Ord, IT Engineer, Staff at Qualcomm Incorporated. “The flexibility, modular nature of Flow means you can create smaller remote actions and reuse them across different workflows with different logic checks. You don’t have to write as extensive of a single script to solve one problem. It allows you to be a lot more flexible.”
The workflow walked through each step required for identification and resolution of this issue – automatically. They started with a wrote a remote action script to check the status of machines – first that the VPN software was installed, and second if there was a binary mismatch.
Once the workflow had established the presence of the software and the mismatch, they had Flow check if the VPN was in active use in a client session. If yes, the workflow paused, so as not to disrupt employees while they were working. But if the VPN was not in use, the workflow continued.
With all necessary conditions established, Flow fired off a remote action to download the most recent package to the device, uninstall the current (old) version, and install the latest. Finally, they built a few extra steps into the workflow to verify that the new version had downloaded correctly, installed properly, and that the two versions of the VPN now matched.
After all that, if the mismatch error remained, they set up an API call in the workflow to open a service desk ticket for further investigation.
Once the team set up the workflow, every step of this process took place automatically, without any need for an engineer to check the success of the remote actions or further troubleshoot devices with issues. The team at Qualcomm Incorporated could even set this workflow to run at regular intervals, enabling continuous management of this VPN issue.
98% Success Rate and a Major Experience Disruption Eliminated
In the end, this workflow had a 98% success rate, drastically reducing interruptions for their employees and reducing the workload for their IT teams. With Flow, Qualcomm Incorporated set up a full end-to-end automation that identified the existence of the VPN issue, remediated the issue without disrupting employees, and validated the fix or submitted a ticket for further investigation.
“Nexthink Flow reduces the amount of scripting needed and the difficulty of the scripting. It’s easier to validate your workflows and your automations. It’s ultimately a more powerful way to do intelligent, proactive IT with detection and remediation,” said Chris Ord, IT Engineer, Staff at Qualcomm Incorporated. “It allows you to focus more on the jobs you want to get done rather than trying to constantly try to fix things that are broken.”
With this single workflow, they were able to dramatically reduce the presence of an issue which had previously impacted 90% of their workforce – improving employee experience and saving time for IT. And Chris Ord says it best, “Flow fixes much broader issues than our VPN mismatch with a lot greater downstream benefits.”
Watch Qualcomm Incorporated discuss this use case in more detail here:
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