{"id":993,"date":"2017-06-07T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-07T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inswwdev.azurewebsites.net\/au\/insights\/uncategorized\/diesel-fuel-speed-and-achieving-enterprise-nirvana-by-combining-fslogix-with-insentra-pia\/"},"modified":"2017-06-07T01:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T01:00:00","slug":"diesel-fuel-speed-and-achieving-enterprise-nirvana-by-combining-fslogix-with-insentra-pia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/insights\/geek-speak\/modern-workplace\/diesel-fuel-speed-and-achieving-enterprise-nirvana-by-combining-fslogix-with-insentra-pia\/","title":{"rendered":"Diesel fuel, speed, and achieving enterprise nirvana by combining FSLogix with Insentra PIA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, what?<\/p>\n

Exactly \u2013 you\u2019re probably thinking to yourself, just what can he be on about\u00a0<\/span>now<\/em>? I thought the title of this article was a subject around enterprise IT? Well yes, but I do so like a good analogy. I recently managed to pull one off using King Kong and Godzilla, so now I\u2019m going to talk about cars. Bear with me\u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big car fan. Not that I can actually do anything with cars besides drive them, I\u2019m not the sort of car fan who tunes his own engine or anything like that. But I do like a good sports car. As my wife can surely testify, I have wasted lots of money on expensive (mainly German) sports cars.<\/p>\n

In the car world, as in many other areas, there are often accepted norms that don\u2019t get challenged. For years, diesel cars were thought of as economic and environmentally friendly, much more so than cars that ran on petrol (or gasoline, depending on which side of the pond you\u2019re sat). And (especially in the UK) we\u2019ve been force-fed a mantra of \u201cspeed kills\u201d for a very long time, contributing to a mass criminalization of ordinary motorists to feed huge revenue streams for police forces.<\/p>\n

In the IT world, sometimes we also come across similar \u201caccepted norms\u201d, because everyone is talking about them, to the extent that we almost accept this as gospel. For a while now, I\u2019ve been telling anyone who will listen that\u00a0<\/span>FSLogix<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>Office365 Containers are the best way to manage OST files, Skype for Business, OneDrive and other cached files within pooled VDI or RDSH environments, or that FSLogix Profile Containers is an easy, low-maintenance method of controlling your user\u2019s profiles. They\u2019re not the\u00a0<\/span>only\u00a0<\/span><\/em>way, but I definitely think that from a perspective of simplicity, management, cost-effectiveness, performance and user experience, they\u2019re the best around.<\/p>\n

However, what we don\u2019t want to do, is hype something up to the extent that it becomes an accepted norm without being challenged. \u201cSurely that doesn\u2019t happen in the IT world?\u201d You\u2019d be surprised. Humans are easily influenced in all walks of life, and if you hear something often enough it can generate not only a lot of buzz, but an almost unthinking concurrence. It\u2019s like the perception of diesel cars as environmentally-friendly and the whole \u201cspeed kills\u201d movement \u2013 they become embedded in the collective consciousness and accepted as hard facts.<\/p>\n

IT has sometimes suffered from over-hyping of technologies and solutions that have not really been suitable for particular environments. As an example, let\u2019s look at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which has been hyped to high heaven and pushed down our throats at every single opportunity over the last ten years. How many of us have seen VDI proposed \u2013 or even deployed \u2013 as a solution to problems that it really wouldn\u2019t help with? I\u2019ve personally seen enterprises deploy VDI where they have already had computing power situated on every desk, or where their applications are very much unsuited to the virtualized delivery model. And worse, not only does it not address the problems at hand, it makes them worse by introducing great layers of complexity to the managed environment that previously didn\u2019t exist. Now this isn\u2019t an anti-VDI tirade \u2013 I have seen it perform excellently in many businesses and bring great value to users \u2013 but the point I am trying to make is no-one should adopt a technology simply because all and sundry are talking it up as the magic bullet that will solve all of your problems and take you to the next step of desktop evolution. Cloud is another prime example \u2013 it can do great things, but it\u2019s very important to choose horses for courses and not get caught up in throwing money at a new paradigm just because everyone you talk to appears to be embracing it as the technological equivalent of paradise itself.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s jump back to cars for a second. How did we come to the perception that diesel-powered engines were so much cleaner and environmentally-friendly than petrol-driven ones? Even though the evidence at hand seemed to contradict this perception \u2013 I\u2019ve always referred to diesel cars as \u201csmokers\u201d due to the occasional cloud of fumes they will spit out \u2013 the general consensus, for a long time, always seemed to be that diesel was better.<\/p>\n

In the case of diesel, it was a poor understanding of emissions and their effects. Legislation was focused very much on CO2 as the environmental threat, and petrol engines emit more CO2 than diesel. Diesel also involved less refining effort, and therefore there had less environmental pressure associated with its actual production.<\/p>\n

However, over the years, we\u2019ve become aware that diesel engines produce more nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxides, which are associated heavily with poor urban air quality. And then there was the whole \u201cdiesel-gate\u201d scandal, as Volkswagen were caught out putting \u201cdefeat devices\u201d into their cars to make them reduce their emissions to legal levels only when in a testing situation, and pumping out up to forty times the legal amount when in normal driving mode. An interesting aside from this, on a technical perspective, is that the \u201cdefeat device\u201d would use a situation when all non-driving wheels were moving but there was no pressure on the steering wheel as an indication that it was under test, and engage the \u201creduced emissions\u201d mode based around this set of parameters.<\/p>\n

So the reason for diesels becoming known as environmentally-friendly was down to, in the main, a poor understanding of the actual effects of emissions on the environment. Naturally, your average man in the street would not have an intimate knowledge of the science around air pollution, and it was only when experts in the field brought their knowledge up-to-date (and when VW\u2019s charade was exposed), that the perception of diesel as a cleaner fuel began to unravel. See below for an example of a now-irony-laced advert for their diesel engines\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You can equate this with IT. How many IT departments have an expert-level understanding of the internals of the devices, operating systems and software under their management? In a lot of cases, IT departments are responsible for operational administration, and a great deal of their understanding of how their systems work on a deeper level is obtained by reading blogs and articles by vendors or community industry experts. And the consensus among vendors and the community can change over time, just like it did with the understanding of the impact of diesel fuel on the environment. Let\u2019s take Folder Redirection as an example here \u2013 there are experts within the IT community who will happily argue the case either for or against Folder Redirection as a solution, with very compelling standpoints from both sides. What IT departments need is to be given the right information, relevant to their environment, which allows them to understand their systems better \u2013 and receive this information in a clear, concise manner.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s go back to cars again to discuss the second analogy I raised \u2013 speed. Somewhere in the 90s, there was a conscious decision made (at least in the UK) to come up with the mantra \u201cspeed kills\u201d. Unlike the diesel engines, there was no science behind this that could be erroneously interpreted. Speed is speed \u2013 you put your foot down, you go faster, a concept that just about anyone can easily grasp.<\/p>\n

Now anyone with half a brain can concede that driving a car at 90mph in a 20mph speed zone on a housing estate in the evening with kids and pets around is\u00a0<\/span>pretty goddamned stupid<\/em>. It\u2019s out of examples like this that the \u2013 initially noble \u2013 idea of \u201cspeed kills\u201d was born. But it slowly grew into something far beyond this, an arms race against the motorists themselves, entwined deeply into the media machine. Turn on any British TV channel and you can see shows like \u201cPolice Interceptors\u201d or \u201cPolice Camera Action!\u201d, complete with traffic officers standing next to the carriageway looking at a pile of crumpled metal, and declaring \u201cthis accident was caused by speeding, pure and simple\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Initially some people (myself probably included) railed against this and actually asked the government of the day to provide statistics to back this up. The problem was, this was a huge job. Collating data from individual police forces and stitching it together involved a lot of time and effort, and there was no central agency that could provide the resource to do it.<\/p>\n

Eventually though, the government commissioned an organization called the Transport Research Laboratory, based in Crowthorne. This was to be their official vehicle research centre, where they collate data on traffic accidents as well as slinging all manner of cars around high speed test tracks, crash rooms, drag strips and banked curves in the midst of the lush forests surrounding sunny Bracknell. And it was here that they decided to do some huge studies on crash analysis and speed, taking into account some enormous sample sets.<\/p>\n

Now, excessive speed makes any accident more violent, but does it specifically cause the accident in the first place? Take a guess at what percentage of accidents the TRL actually found were caused directly by speeding? 40%? 30%? (It\u2019s interesting how high people\u2019s initial guesses will go, indicating a high level of penetration for the government\u2019s \u201cspeed kills\u201d message) In actual fact, the rate was around 4%. If you then factored in \u201closs of control\u201d accidents such as black ice, wheels coming off, etc. the percentage of accidents where speed was a contributory factor was under 2%. The government\u2019s own research proved, quite tellingly, that the highest cause of accidents on the road is quite simply what police forces lump under the catch-all definition of \u201cdriving without due care and attention\u201d \u2013 failure to judge path or speed of other road users, inattention to approaching vehicles, failing to spot a hazard, etc.<\/p>\n

Does the 1.9% justify the increased usage of speed cameras? Probably not, but police forces are still expanding their camera presence, and it\u2019s mainly because of revenue, not safety. Speed cameras can generate thousands of pounds an hour when active, and several individual cameras in Britain posted earnings of well over the \u00a31 million mark last year! But the TRL also did a study on speed cameras, and one of the things it looked at, amongst many others, was the presence of speed cameras and their effect on accidents. And what did the statistics come up with? Shockingly, precisely the opposite of what the anti-speed campaigners were hoping for \u2013 they actually found that speed cameras made accidents more, not less, likely to occur. At road works, the accident rate increased by a mammoth 55% with the presence of speed cameras. On open motorway, the cameras increased it by a not-inconsiderable 32%. This study was done over a period of eighteen months and covered 4.1 million vehicle kilometres \u2013 a pretty large and comprehensive sample set.<\/p>\n

Before I go off on a real rant, let\u2019s get back to the point I was trying to make. IT is the same, in that much of the time, it is very difficult to collect, collate and compare operational metrics, for reasons of time, skills and resource. The British public were lucky that an organization like the TRL was commissioned to pull together the statistics for road safety (even if its findings were unceremoniously ditched for coming up with the \u201cwrong\u201d conclusions!) The IT world isn\u2019t as politically motivated, but what it does have in common is that we\u2019re often left to our own devices when it comes to gathering the numbers required for monitoring performance, testing systems and building business cases. If you get inaccurate data or metrics, then you\u2019re going to be in trouble.<\/p>\n

So what we need is good, relevant, concise data about our environments, and we need it delivered without a huge overhead in terms of skills and management that disrupts our daily workloads. And if we can get data delivered of this quality in this way, we can then make proper informed decisions about the latest buzz we\u2019re hearing in the IT community. Such as people like me telling everyone that FSLogix is the solution to performance issues on Office365 and dealing with the whole Windows profile in general ?<\/p>\n

Is there a way we can get data of this quality, focused to our specific environmental requirements, without the huge effort?<\/p>\n

Well, there are a plethora of monitoring solutions in the world. But the problem I generally find with them is that they all involve a significant investment in setup, learning and ongoing tuning. It\u2019s almost like asking the general public to do the TRL\u2019s research themselves \u2013 it can be a huge task. And if you don\u2019t have a deep understanding of the internals of modern computer systems, then you\u2019re going to be in the position of possibly looking in the wrong places for your data anyway, much like when we concentrated on CO2 as the harmful exhaust emission gas without taking into account all of the other poisons being spewed out.<\/p>\n

This is where \u2013 yes, I\u2019ve got to my point eventually \u2013 a company called\u00a0<\/span>Insentra<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>comes in, with an offering called\u00a0<\/span>Predictive Insights and Analytics<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>(PIA for short). I\u2019m so glad they didn\u2019t call it Predictive Insights, Trends and Analytics ?<\/p>\n

The importance of metrics<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Many \u2013 I\u2019d say up to 85% \u2013 of projects I\u2019ve worked on recently have little or no metrics from right across the environment. Metrics that they\u00a0<\/span>are<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>monitoring (if any) are infrastructure-focused \u2013 networks, storage, databases. But in today\u2019s world it\u2019s the holistic view, the components that contribute to end-user experience, that need to be monitored. Very few places monitor the\u00a0<\/span>entire\u00a0<\/span><\/em>estate with the same level of detail reserved for back-end infrastructure components.<\/p>\n

And even though there are great technologies out there that can provide this level of monitoring across the entire estate, there are problems. Technology like Lakeside SysTrack offers unparalleled visibility into your environment, but it needs to be purchased, implemented, supported, and continually tuned. This is a not-insignificant investment of time and resource \u2013 and as such there needs to be a compelling business case that can justify the investment beyond the scope of the current project. This is often the stage where interest fades \u2013 companies love the technology, they see the need, but they struggle to build the business case that will turn interest into investment.<\/p>\n

Insentra\u2019s PIA offering ticks a number of boxes that will make it so much easier. Firstly, they build the dashboards for you, using their own tech on top of a base Lakeside SysTrack core, and can tailor this to as many \u2013 or as few \u2013 metrics as you require. Secondly, it can all be cloud-based (although it doesn\u2019t have to be), reducing the overhead of deploying the solution either as a PoC or in production. Thirdly, you can consume the offering for a specific period of time, so if you just need to invest in a monitoring solution for the specific duration of a project, it doesn\u2019t have to be something you\u2019re signing up to pay for on a continual basis. But the most important point is that monitoring doesn\u2019t become an ongoing headache for the IT department \u2013 it just works. And that frees your staff up to innovate, to find new ways for IT to make the business more profitable and productive \u2013 not leave them fighting fires all of the time.<\/p>\n

Combining features of FSLogix and Insentra gives you a lot of freedom to concentrate on developing IT services and enabling your users. Management complexity of applications and profiles is stripped away, performance problems with the Office365 suite are removed, and you get proactive alerts on the health of your environment and continual justification of whether your infrastructure is performing as expected. You don\u2019t need to build a business case \u2013 the service itself can build it for you ?<\/p>\n

We can easily spit out this \u201cauto-justification\u201d by pointing the PIA engine at FSLogix itself to find out exactly how much of a business benefit you\u2019re getting. What PIA also calculates is a cumulative metric called \u201cservice quality\u201d which is an attempt to quantify that metric that is\u00a0<\/span>so\u00a0<\/span><\/em>important to every enterprise out there, the sometime intangible known as \u201cuser experience\u201d.<\/p>\n

Insentra did what they do, and collated custom dashboards that run within their managed service to provide information on KPIs for systems both with and without the FSLogix solutions installed. There was no need for any learning of the product on our part \u2013 we simply told Insentra what we wanted, and they came back with the dashboards for us to plug our test systems into. As easy as that \u2013 one agent installation, and we are good to go, and now we can define the KPIs we want to see on our dashboards.<\/p>\n

With regard to understanding Outlook performance both with and without FSLogix in use, we plumped for three fairly straightforward indicators.<\/p>\n