DEM in 20 – That Crashy App

Transcript

Alex:
Hello everyone. Welcome to episode two of DEM in 20, I'm Alex.

Michael:
I'm, Michael, thanks so much for joining us today. I'm director of product marketing at 1E and Alex you are?

Alex:
Product manager at 1E. I'm product manager of Tachyon Protect, the latest application coming to you. This is episode two of That Crashy App. We're so happy to have you here today. I know we're starting a couple minutes late, but as you can see, look at this overlay, it looks fantastic. How are you doing Michael? Talk to me.

Michael:
Yeah, doing well, I know it's been a busy two weeks since the last episode. I've already kicked off that countdown timer. So 20 minutes is what we commit to. We'll be done in that amount of time. What we do is we unpack the craziest issues that people experience in digital experience management and monitoring. And we try to do that together. We bring on a special guest, we give away prizes and we also take questions.

Michael:
So please remember that there's the chat box option, the Q and A option there. Submit your questions, last week or sorry, episode one, two weeks ago, we gave away $50 to Diego, and there's a chance to do that again today. So if you ask a great question and you're one of the ones that are selected, then you have the chance of winning that 50 dollars as well. So please get involved that way.

Michael:
Episode one is also already online. So if you go to our 1E website, you can find that, which focused on the slow running end point. And we covered that topic off. We covered off some troubleshooting, but today, what are we talking about for episode two?

Alex:
Well, we're continuing the theme of relatable issues, Michael, with That Crashy App and that could mean all sorts of things, right? Is it the software that's causing the hardware to crash? Is it the hardware causing the software to crash? Is it chicken that came first or the egg? I just, as someone with high-performance hardware, I'm often expecting the best of my machine, both at work and at home. So if I buy a piece of software that usually costs a lot of money per month, or just an upfront payment and that crashes on me, I'm usually left feeling pretty bad.

Alex:
I don't know about you, but we've got things like cyberpunk 2077, which wasn't great. I bought a 3000 series graphics card, over 800 pounds spent only for it to crash again and again, but then also in the workplace, right? I got a medium tier laptop. I'm used to a little bit more than I'm getting and I can't run basic apps, like Photoshop. Their crashing out on me and I've got to wait for a ticket from support. You know, that just doesn't feel great. Do you have any stories like that, any experience?

Michael:
Nothing with Cyberpunk. I feel like on Reddit, I saw lots of memes about that game just having lots of issues and glitches. I don't know if ever got fixed or not. I think for me, I do a lot of my work at Google Docs or Google Slides and need to access Chrome to get to those platforms when I'm sharing a presentation. You're pretty much out of luck if you try to open Chrome as an example, and you can't because it's crashing or it's lagging and it keeps crashing on you. Those are huge frustrations, especially when what we depend on for presentations and spreadsheets and the likes through cloud-based software can become quite an in-assessable when those apps are crashing. So that's been a big frustration of mine, and I believe that our special guest today, Michael, if you'd like to switch on your camera and introduce yourself, we'll be taking us through maybe which will troubleshoot in that scenario.

Alex:
Hey Michael.

Michael:
Hey.

Michael Mott:
How are you? Hey guys, how are you today?

Alex:
Yeah, good. Feeling good.

Michael:
Doing well.

Alex:
So me and Michael lightly touched on applications crashing to desktop, but that doesn't even account for a complete Windows crash. So talk to us. What are you going to show us today?

Michael Mott:
Well, I wanted to approach this from somebody would be getting dropped into a Tachyon Experience as a new user. They were brought on potentially to help maybe send out surveys to customers, see how they're feeling, especially in this new working from home environment. We really don't know what the end user is feeling. And even though we have this great new tool Tachyon to allow us to maybe query the end points in real time, and I'm going to, is it safe to assume that there may be some people on the call that don't know what Tachyon actually does?

Alex:
Well, I mean, for those people on the call perhaps you could tell them?

Michael Mott:
Yeah, so Tachyon uses a single packet technology to query an endpoint in real-time in a secure manner. So if I really wanted to look at something that was going on, on the endpoint, I can actually query it in real time to figure out what's actually happening. So if I wanted to look at what's installed on those machines, I can do that fairly quickly. And you can see that I'm hitting over 14,000 machines in real-time and pulling that information back. So that real time capability allows us to look at other things that are going on, whether it's hardware, software crashes and the like.

Alex:
So, I mean, that sounds great for the organization that would perhaps purchase that. But what's the benefit to me, the average user, right? I don't want to wait for my company to go to procurement and you experienced that. Tell me how does that benefit me?

Michael Mott:
So what that does for us is it allows the IT person to actually look at what's happening in real time and not have to potentially call the user. So we can actually get their experience from those apps crashing. Maybe potentially the PC is performing slow. A lot of time users are, they don't complain until it gets really bad. So what if we can stop that in advance or see it in advance what's happening? And that's what I'm going to kind of demo today and go through That Crashy App that we were talking about. So if you guys are ready, I can kind of proceed with that. If there's any other questions.

Alex:
No, that's interesting, let's get straight into.

Michael:
Yeah, go for it.

Alex:
Michael, how much time does he have left?

Michael Mott:
Yeah how much time do I have?

Michael:
We're down to 14 minutes so go for it.

Michael Mott:
14 minutes. Okay. I'm going to go into... I am a new sentiment user here. I've been hired to actually look at my devices across the board. And what we're talking about today is a crashy app that's probably happening on our loaner pool. So what I did is I had this small environment here and I showed our responses over here from our rather large environment. And I'll kind of highlight that later, but here I have this experience module that allows me to see an overview of everything.

Michael Mott:
Experience is made up of a couple of different scores. The user sentiment, the performance of the PC, the responsiveness of the PC. When I drill down into the categories, I can see across the board that....

Alex:
Do you want to share your screen real quick, Michael?

Michael Mott:
Oh, I'm not sharing. What happened?

Alex:
So walk us through that again. What's the difference between stability, responsiveness, and performance. Talk to me like I'm a layman.

Michael Mott:
What's nice about that is, if I look at the overview, this experience score is calculated by four different things. Performance, stability of the device, responsiveness, and user sentiment. And that's the new piece that we've added to this. If I drill into those categories, stability is around software hangs and crashes. What we're going to talk about today. Maybe some operating system failures and operating system crashes. The responsiveness is around Windows UI, and Windows internals, and systems startup. So I think you've may have experienced where you launch Outlook and the screen is blank for a little bit and you don't know why. And then Outlook comes up. Nobody complains about that, but we can actually get that information and report on it. And performance is based off system disk performance, network throughput, memory performance, and CPU performance. So my loaner pool looks good for this and I can actually isolate it just to those two devices.

Michael Mott:
So I click on the loaner pool, that's my management group, and I can see things look really good, but there's been a dip here in the sentiment score for this isn't really good. So I am the new sentiment person. I am the new person that sends out surveys to my users to see how they're actually feeling about what's going on. And when I drill into that sentiment tab, I can actually see that somebody is not happy with something that I've done or something that I've pushed out. So my survey lets me know that there's some poor ratings out here. I've got a couple of very good, but I got an average and three or four that are not happy.

Michael Mott:
So what I can now do is I can actually go to my survey that I actually pushed out and you can see here, I have two surveys. One is enabled and the other one is not. So that's related to the Chrome browser. So we knew that we loaded up our loaner pool with those. And I'm going to drill into this end user satisfaction survey to find out a little bit more about what's going on. Any questions so far.

Alex:
So I, this is me personally. I don't know how you feel Michael, but I personally hate being disturbed whilst I'm working. Well, that could be anything, with an app crashing, but perhaps a survey would be just as annoying. Is there any way to protect my deep working flow? You know? How do you know how not to disturb me?

Michael Mott:
What's nice about the 1E client is we actually track mouse movements, usage process, we even look at what Windows are up. So even if I had a teams chat up, I won't even send a survey up because we see that there's a window open where somebody might be sharing something. So we've built into the client that ability to not disturb the user when they're actually working and only respond and pop surveys when things are not happening. Does that make sense?

Alex:
That makes a huge amount of sense. Digital experience management is all around assisting the user do the best work they can. And I think sentiment is a really great addition here.

Michael:
Yeah.

Alex:
Talk to me more about where you'd go from here.

Michael Mott:
So as I drill into this, I can actually see that, okay, PC 005 in the loaner pool seems to have some good responses from the user. But if I actually click over here and I'll zoom in a little bit, you can actually see that some people are not happy. You see down here that every time I get this loan or it performs poorly. If I look at that, that's PC 004. Why does this loaner laptop not work with Chrome? PC 5 always runs. Chrome will not run. And I like this one down here in the middle here. It says what the C? I imagine that means what the crap. What's wrong with this laptop. And maybe here at the bottom, we see that this user brought their laptop home from the loaner pool and let their parent use it. And even their mom has issues with it. Because maybe that person thinks that I'm a good user, but my mom's not.

Michael Mott:
But there's clues in here. There's really some clues in here, the webpage loaded and when I was looking at pictures from NASA, it crashed. So what does that mean potentially? Maybe there's something actually going on, on that device. So if I drill into the good machine, now I get real time information and I can see the experience dashboard for that device. I can see that my surveys were good and I can actually look at the logs. So now in real time, I'm actually looking at things that have occurred. I can see someone booted this system up this morning, but I don't see anything bad in here. I can search on the events. If I type in crash, I can actually see if there was a crash on a device and there's not.

Michael Mott:
But we know PC 004 is our culprit. So if I go back to my survey, kind of clicked off there and I go into PC 004, I can see his sentiment is not good at all. And I can drill down in here and see that, okay, the user satisfaction survey for that person or for that device was not what we had expected. They were talking about Chrome. Let's look at the real time logs. We'll look at there. Now what I've done is I've actually drilled in and I can see that Chrome has been crashing over days. I can even see that the user might have tried to get around it by installing Mozilla Firefox.

Michael Mott:
So now I know that there's something wrong with this device. What could it be? Is the network performance bad? And I can actually drill in, in real time, see the network throughput on the device, but maybe the key lies somewhere else. I can't render images causing Chrome to crash. If I go look at the hardware, aha! I really don't have a lot of disc space left.

Michael Mott:
So you've seen how I've actually used a survey to find out user sentiment or how people are feeling to drill into where my crashy app is. Now, the nice thing about this is, is that there's really no disk space there and if I actually go to that device, I can see that it only has that much space. And here's my survey kicking up asking me again. I'm just going to say it's very poor and submit that. But as the sentiment user or the admin for this. If I come back here, I can actually take action on this now. So if I click explore, that's going to take me over to the Explorer where I can actually clean up disk space here.

Michael Mott:
Now, if I had ServiceNow I could actually launch some of these instruction or this window potentially from within ServiceNow. So if the user called up and it opened a ticket, then I could do that work from here. But what I'm going to do here is I'm going to type in disk. I'm actually going to free up some disc space. Now I'm not going to remove the log files off the machine because maybe my security team or my troubleshooting team wants those log files. So it wouldn't make sense for me to remove those, but I can't just go Willy nilly and go out and do things to devices. I actually have to have an approval process to do that.

Michael Mott:
That's our two factor authentication. So I confirm and send that. Now somebody has to approve that. And I have my person over here, Alice Neal, who's my approver for all these things that'll touch the end device that could potentially create a problem. If I refresh this, Alice Neal will have some notifications and she's okay with me doing this. It's just one device. I'm going to approve that. And now it's going to go out there and clean up the disc space off that machine. And as this runs through, I'll stop if there's any questions or if you guys want to add some color to this. You can see it's actually cleaning up the disc based on some of the other devices too.

Alex:
That's, I think a really an interesting concept there. So you've shown us that through a combination of knowledge that, okay, this user is unhappy, to dig through what that might be using logs and you've identified that Chrome is the issue. Understanding that you've gone into their devices metrics and seeing that their disk space is full and you've been able to apply that to your entire estate or to other devices similarly affected by that. How can I, as this UX manager, control that? How have you done that here?

Michael Mott:
So the way I can do that is I can set up role-based access control. I can keep other people from doing things. So in this instance, I actually set up a user that only had access to be able to do those particular things. So if I actually go into the switch app and I look at the settings, I can actually look at the permissions and the role. So I only gave this person survey administrator capabilities to look at things and to run a few particular instructions that are limited just to that group or that user. So I can use role based access control to keep people from doing things they shouldn't, but seeing the things that are to their job role.

Alex:
Awesome.

Michael:
Another thing that's worth pointing out there is you went to that sentiment survey result and at first glance it looked like everything on the left for that user was quite positive. Their responsiveness, I guess sustainability when it comes to the different dials that were on the left side. We could see that from a high level, it looked like everything would be working quite well, or they would be a happy user. Yeah, all those on the left, they all look really positive for experience stability, responsiveness. But when you got down to sentiment on that user, that was down to 30, which just goes to show that you can't just look at those top four alone, because really at the end of the day, unless you ask somebody directly, you don't really know the full picture, I suppose.

Michael Mott:
That's correct. And I think a lot of times, and that's where-

Michael:
They look quite happy there.

Michael Mott:
Yeah, things are working nicely here, but their experience was poor. And we don't know that unless they start calling in or raise a ticket, but using surveys, we can actually pinpoint where those issues lie and actually look at things in real time. So we can even see today that it crashed. So, that's kind of how I would use the tool to actually look at crashing apps. If I look, there's other ways that we can do that. So if I go to Experience in real time, just to show it across the board, I can actually go to the software tab and then I can sort by crashes. So I sort by descending and I could see that, wow, the Microsoft operating system crashes a lot, but I can also-

Alex:
So Michael, you've got three minutes left. I'm going to amp up the pace by asking a difficult question. Talk to me how, if you didn't have Tachyon, how would you deal with this? We discussed in episode one that the user complaining, we saw through that sentiment survey, is actually the last thing that you want to happen. The user's had enough and they've dealt with it for many weeks. Talk to me about the world without Tachyon trying to solve these issues.

Michael Mott:
So without Tachyon, you may have to rely on some other management tools to potentially do that. You know, maybe you an email survey out, you don't get a response from people in the exact amount of time. So are you saying somebody that doesn't have Experience or doesn't have Tachyon how would they deal with a crashing app? Maybe they all send out a PowerShell script. There could be other different ways to touch the end point to get that information. But I feel that that creates overhead, that creates management, the particular guy knows how to do something, but not everybody else does. But putting Tachyon, in place and using tools that talk to the end point in real time. That makes more sense to me than to have a bunch of other people that can do things where everything could be done through one single management point or end point device. Does that make sense?

Michael:
Okay. Cool.

Michael Mott:
Those are actually directed towards calls to the operating system. So I'm actually listing the disc drives here. I'm using native calls to the operating system. So there's no real AI that's in here. We're actually querying the end points. There is AI around where we look at software and use-

Alex:
Michael I'm afraid that that's all the time we've got.

Michael Mott:
Oh, we're out of time.

Alex:
That's Dem in 20. So today we've decided to choose a random attendee who stayed to the end of the show to win the prize. So, Michael, do you want to choose someone and I will put them on screen.

Michael:
Sure. Let's go down through the list and stop randomly at...

Alex:
We really need a drum roll effect for the show. So look out for episode three, maybe we'll add that in.

Michael:
Jason Knight

Alex:
Jason Knight, congratulations. We'll be in touch after the show to award you your prize? That's it. That's the show. Please stay tuned for episode three. When is that? Do you want to announce that now, Michael?

Michael:
Sure. It's going to be in two weeks time from now and we're going to be looking at, what would you say? Yeah. Good question, actually. We've got so many coming up, they're all just floating around in my head at this very moment. Let me just make sure I got that. Hold on for me.

Alex:
Episode three is-

Michael:
Instantaneous Admin Rights Request I believe.

Alex:
That's correct. I know that's something that I deal with every week. So looking forward to that and chatting to our guest. So thank you so much, Michael, both Michael. Michael and Michael. It's been really, really great having you both and see you again the next time. Thanks everyone.

Michael Mott:
Sounds great.

Michael:
All right, cheers all. Bye.