The Power of Visibility: Energy Company Uncovers the True Root Cause At Last
If you work in end user computing, you’re no stranger to the irritation of mystery issues. Tickets come in weekly but no matter how many teams you talk to, or fixes you try to implement, the issues never go away. You search and search for the root cause - but can’t find it.
Frustrated, you assume it’s something outside of your control. Maybe the issues is caused by home Wi-Fi or end user error. That must be it – right?
But making assumptions about the root cause of issues is frustrating for IT teams, inefficient, and can lead to unforeseen consequences down the road. Yet without access to end user experience data from all your endpoints, you’ll always be left working off of best guesses and assumptions. When you’re blind to the endpoints, how can you effectively diagnose endpoint issues?
One of our customers, a major US Energy company, recently shared a story that perfectly illustrated the power of enterprise-wide visibility. They’d been chasing an issue for months, only to finally uncover the root cause once they’d turned the lights on in their environment with Nexthink. As you’ll read, their story is a familiar one, following a simple pattern that any end user computing professional will recognize.
The Issue is Reported But Doesn’t Exist
This story begins, as many digital workplace stories do, with a ticket. Tickets came flooding into the service desk from employees saying their Office application was freezing up. Some tickets referenced Word, others Outlook, others Powerpoint. It could be any Office application, but they all had the same issue in common: the Office application would freeze for a period of time, hindering the employee’s productivity.
These were slippery issues, however. By the time a service desk agent could respond to the ticket, the application would be back to normal. When the service desk agent was unable to figure out what was going on, they escalated these tickets to the Office team.
Application Team Sees No Cause for Concern
With no obvious device-side cause for these Office issues, the Office team looked into their own systems but saw nothing out of the ordinary. All Office applications were stable. The ticket was punted back to the service desk, without an identified fix.
Yet the issues kept coming. After months of searching for a root cause, the team was forced to assume the issue was caused by something outside of their control – such as home Wi-Fi.
Without the right data, they had no way to figure out what was causing this issue for sure and had no choice but to rely on their best guess. They were incredibly frustrated by this, but what else could they do?
Complete Visibility Reveals A Different Picture
This cat and mouse game continued for months, until this Utilities provider placed Nexthink in their environment. With our agent on enough of their endpoints, they were able to see exactly what was happening on each device at the precise moment this Office issue occurred.
The next time an employee submitted a ticket for an Office application freezing up, the service desk drilled down to the device timeline view and noticed an interesting correlation: the freezing app was preceded by an issue with the VPN agent.
Huh. Not one ticket had flagged a VPN issue until now. They hadn’t made the connection between Office applications freezing and the VPN before now. Could this be the source of their problems?
The team ran an investigation of all devices which had this Office issue, and lo and behold, there was the answer – every instance of a freezing Office application was related to a VPN issue.
The team leveraged Nexthink benchmarking to test a new version of the VPN, first ensuring it was stable in their environment. Tests complete, they deployed a newer version of the VPN to these devices, and thanks to Nexthink, the freezing issues disappeared.
From receiving tickets for this issue a few times a week to even, sometimes, a couple times a day – now the issue has completely disappeared. Best of all, they were able to make this change to the VPN completely in the background, so the end users didn’t have to interrupt their workday.
Endpoint visibility unlocked new data and new correlations – allowing this customer to solve a problem which had hounded their service desk for months. That is the power of enterprise-wide visibility.
To hear more stories from customers in the Energy and Utilities space, watch this live session from Experience Everywhere 2022 – and join us live this October as we return to the Experience Stage once again!
