Top 5 Largest Non-Profit Health System Improves Epic Hyperdrive Speed and Reliability by reducing Citrix Logon Times by >50%

“With Goliath, we were able to take corrective action to dramatically improve our clinicians experience around speed and reliability and Epic Hyperdrive.”

– Director of Citrix System Engineering Team, Non-profit Health System

Infrastructure

Epic Hyperdrive, Citrix

Challenge

The IT Incident Response Team was investigating multiple instances where end users were reporting slow logon performance when accessing Epic Hyperdrive via Citrix. In all cases, the account in use was a generic unassigned account presenting a challenge for the IT team in pinpointing the root cause of the Epic Hyperdrive speed & reliability issues.

While not initially apparent based on submitted support tickets, these issues were intermittent spanning 10 health systems, over 60 locations, and more than 37k users. There was significant impact to speed & reliability of Epic Hyperdrive and other clinical applications using Citrix to provide access.

Solution

The IT team leveraged Goliath’s AI-enhanced contextual data to help isolate the root cause of the logon issues, giving them the necessary information to permanently resolve the problem. Goliath was able to identify repeated Citrix and Epic Hyperdrive login failures followed by a successful, but relatively slow logon, for these accounts. Goliath also identified this was happening from multiple devices. Drilling into the failed sessions, it was immediately clear that the “profile load” stage of the Citrix logon was taking too long. Even with successful Citrix logons, the profile load time was extremely high.

This health system uses local profiles on Epic Citrix servers, and this step in the logon process should be completed within 1-2 seconds. Looking at the Active Directory object for that account, they found a defined home folder path that should not be there. The identified path does not exist on the network and as a result, users were forced to wait for Windows to time-out the home drive connect action before eventually being logged into their workstation, or having their Citrix delivered applications connect.

As this path was a legacy carryover from a Google Drive migration, they opened a Priority 2 ticket and then implemented an emergency change to remove the path from the Active Directory object resolving the forced timeouts and long logon times.

Additionally, this problem had been previously reported by users; however, lacking the necessary data, the team was unable to identify the root cause and put permanent fixes 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 the reported issue was now permanently resolved, the IT team got proactive and leveraged Goliath’s AI-enhanced contextual data and Citrix Fault Isolation reporting to identify all users who were experiencing Epic Hyperdrive speed & reliability issues. It was immediately apparent that the original issue, while not widely reported, was in fact a widespread problem.

They immediately kicked off an initiative to identify and resolve user path issues. In addition, they configured Goliath to alert on Citrix and Epic Hyperdrive logons that extend beyond an acceptable threshold allowing them to resolve speed & reliability issues before end users are impacted.

In the end, they were able to reduce Epic Hyperdrive logon times by more than 50% across 37k users.