Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / 🗣️ ALL NEW PARALLEL: S1E4 - The Virtual Murder

Transcript

🗣️ ALL NEW PARALLEL: S1E4 - The Virtual Murder · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Time is money, at least that's the saying. But in
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the world of virtual desktops, time isn't just money. It's
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: a victim, and the crime scene is a murder. It's
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: real messy, and the suspects, it seems, it's always the
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: VDI team. Last week, on parallel, the dex team at
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: Zentech uncovered a troubling pattern employees so accustomed to frustration
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: that they stopped rebooting their systems altogether. It was a
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: tale of quiet despair, of complacency breeding chaos. And while
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: reboots aren't really an issue in VDI since they can
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: be centrally managed, the team at Zenech found a population
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: even more frustrated than the no reboot crowd. With the
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: help of their decks AI assistant, they decided to run
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: an analysis of VDI performance problems that went deeper than reboots,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and the team at zen Tech found something even more troubling,
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: a ghost in the machine. It seemed to be wreaking
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: havoc everywhere, slow log ons, frozen applications, and an entire
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: department blocked out for no clear reason. Employees helplessly wait
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: while it scrambles, but the scramble isn't to fix the problem,
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: it's to prove that they aren't the source of it.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: The network team blames the storage team, the storage team
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: blames the server team, the server team blames the application team,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: and the VDI team. They take all the blame. Stuck
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: in the middle, trying to catch a shadow that no
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: one seems to be and all of this chaos is
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: eating away at employee productivity and it budgets Today. In
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: episode four, The Virtual Murder, we ask what is foundation
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: and who or what brought it into Zentec's VDI ecosystem.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Pam is on the VDI support team and she's working
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: with a remote employee who has become completely fed up
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: with their slow session. She's been chasing a slowdown in
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Terrence's virtual desktop for over a week, and every time
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: she thinks she's found the issue, it slips through her fingers.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: It's been six minutes just waiting for outlook to open.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Now I see why people are so frustrated with their systems.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, if I hear it must be a network
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: problem one more time.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: In the background, I can hear Terrence on the.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: Speakerphone saying I told you, and it's not just out
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: look and things are to slow down. I can't get
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: anything done.
• 2:53
  Speaker 4: I can't figure it out. He clicks the icon and
• 2:56
  Speaker 4: nothing happens, or it does, but it's like ten seconds later,
• 3:02
  Speaker 4: and he says the keys they feel like sponges as
• 3:04
  Speaker 4: he types. I can see the screen delay behind every letter.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: But this isn't isolated. The storage team claims their appliances
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: are operating within their limits. The server team blames latency
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: on a vendor update, and the application team swears it's
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: a corrupted VDI profile, and the network team proves it's
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: not their fault. Several times a day. I happened to
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: step into the noisy data center and found the team
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: debating the issue.
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: We checked the VDI farm and the servers all seem fine.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: I keep telling you it's not a network problem.
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: We've upgraded every circuit involved, but we can't see anything
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: in the last mind packet lost.
• 3:42
  Speaker 5: Could it be a routing issue. Let's do what next?
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: Thing says, Yep, it's time we look at this over
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: in dexops.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: It had been a few days since I talked with
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: the team, and if you can't tell, they are now
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: in full blown crisis mode. They're all in the decks
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Ops command center now, and Jessica is focused on her
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: monitor and the analysis that the AI assistant is showing her.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: That's when she sees it. A log file referencing the Foundation.
• 4:10
  Speaker 5: Hey, what's this update that ran last week? Does anyone
• 4:13
  Speaker 5: know what Foundation is? It's all over these VDI logs.
• 4:17
  Speaker 5: It looks like it's running processes during peak hours.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: There it was again, the Foundation, a name the team
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: keeps hearing, but no one seems to know what it
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: is or who deployed it. Then the storage team had
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: an interesting question. Foundation. Isn't that the old vendor tool
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: they put on the shelf last year?
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: I thought that too, But clearly it is not shelved.
• 4:43
  Speaker 5: It's everywhere and it's running a process called Cascade. Whatever
• 4:47
  Speaker 5: it is, it's eating resources like crazy.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Pam, with the help of assist, kept digging. The deeper
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: she goes, the more she finds. Foundation isn't just running
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: non VDI. It's integrated into application servers, storage appliances, and
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: network routers. It's been hiding in plane sight. It's everywhere,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: but there's no documentation, no support tickets, no fingerprints, and
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: the engineer who owned the platform left the company six
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: months ago. Then I overheard the application team lead make
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: an interesting comment.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: You said, Cascade. Wasn't that the new load balancing platform
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: that never really worked? I thought it got shut down
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: last year. Why is it still running?
• 5:32
  Speaker 5: I don't know, but it's definitely not balancing loads, it's
• 5:36
  Speaker 5: creating them.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: It was strange that the application and VDI team leads
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: weren't aware, and as PAM closed in on the source
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: of the slowdown, the foundation kept turning up. But now
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: it's not just a name, it's a pattern. Scripts running
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: when they shouldn't. Code embedded in places it doesn't belong,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: a process called Cascade that seems to be manipulating data
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: flows across the entire system. And if you remember Fred,
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: he runs the DEX team, So I talked with him
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: to see how they were tackling this problem.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: Now, we probably should have done this sooner, but moving
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: the SWAT team over to the dexsop center it made
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: all the difference. When we took that wider look, including
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: both physical and virtual machines, and used all the correlated data,
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: we had a view of the whole enterprise. We found
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: that many of our VDI users were actually losing twenty
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: percent of their workday to slow sessions, and it wasn't
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: just one person. We stopped the blame game. Instead of
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: bouncing a ticket from team to team, we brought every
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: IT discipline into the DEXSOPS command center. So I'm talking VDI, network, service, storage,
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: EUC applications, even security. They all shared a single set
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: of data from the DEX platform, So no more conflicting reports,
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: no more siloed investigations, and no more defensive troubleshooting. We
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: found systems communicating and causing delays that should have never
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: been there in the first place, and that no one saw.
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: Certainly it couldn't have correlated them with each other. We
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: found all the hidden components of the Foundation, and we
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: shut it down and our delays disappeared. The VDI team
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: was right all along. It wasn't their full.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: So they were able to shut down the controlling session
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: named the Foundation, and found all of the components of
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: Cascade processes across VDI and elsewhere that were installed, returning
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: performance and usability to the users. But I've seen it
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: before and I'm sure I'll see it again. Every day
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: businesses are losing money to issues in VDI and a
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: lack of holistic visibility to find the true culprit quickly
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: delays caused it costs to spiral and VD teams to
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: defend their platform, and meanwhile remote employees suffer in silence.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: But here's the thing. The case can be solved. The
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: clues are there, you just have to know where to
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: look and have a little help from an AI assistant.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: And what about the origins of the Foundation and Cascade.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The team made some interesting discoveries about that old system
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: that was never fully dismantled, but it intersects with another issue.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: They uncovered another silent killer of productivity. While Zentech is
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: making slow systems, bad service and technology failures a thing
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: of the past, technology is changing so much and so frequently,
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: their employees just can't keep up. They've been trained, but
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: can't retain half of what they've learned. Next week, we'll
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: look at a theory that seems to have been the
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: true demise of the Foundation, a failed transformation that continues
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: to cost the company time and money. But what's worse
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: is the employee knowledge gap that's also also losing paying customers.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Join us next time on Parallel for episode five, The
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Forgotten
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: M M. M.