Top 5 Largest Non-Profit Health System

Health System Reduces Logon Times for Epic Hyperspace by >50%

Infrastructure

Epic Hyperspace, Citrix

“With Goliath, we were able to take corrective action to dramatically improve the user experience with Citrix and Epic Hyperspace.”

– Citrix System Engineer, Non-profit Health System

Challenge

The IT Incident Response Team was investigating multiple instances where end users were reporting slow logon performance accessing Epic Hyperspace using Citrix. In all cases, the account in use was a generic account presenting a challenge for the IT team to pinpoint the root cause of the Epic Hyperspace and Citrix logon issues.

These issues were intermittent across 10 health systems involving over 60 locations and more than 37k users. The applications involved Epic Hyperspace and other clinical applications using Citrix to provide access.

Solution

The IT team leveraged Goliath to help quickly isolate root cause. Goliath was able to point out repeated Citrix and Epic Hyperspace login failures followed by a successful, but relatively slow logon, for these accounts but from multiple devices. Digging into the failed sessions it was clear that the “profile load” stage of the Citrix logon was taking far too long. Even with successful Citrix logons, the profile load time was still extremely high.

The health system uses local profiles on Epic Citrix servers and this step should be completed within a second or two. Looking at the Active Directory object for that account, they found a defined home folder path. The identified path does not exist on the network and as a result, users must wait for Windows to time-out the home drive connect action before being logged into their workstation or having their Citrix apps connect.

As this path does not exist and should not be defined since migrating to Google Drive, they opened a Priority 2 ticket and then implemented an emergency change to remove the path from the Active Directory object.

It was also noted that this problem has been reported in the past by users; however, lacking the necessary data, they were unable to put a permanent fix in place.

Results

Since the time they implemented the change, they’ve seen the logon times for that account reduced by 50% or more.

While incorrect/problem home drive paths are nothing new for the HIT team, they were able to see the same problem across many other user accounts without having to search for them one-by-one or wait for users to call in. The go forward plan is to immediately kick off an initiative to find and correct these user path issues. In addition, they configured Goliath to alert on Citrix and Epic Hyperspace logons that extend beyond an acceptable threshold.