Understanding The Impact of Browser Generated Data on Logons When Using Ivanti UWM Environment Manager

Understanding the impact of Personalization Server and Browser Settings

If you’ve looked at “The impact of browser generated data on an Ivanti UWM Environment Manager Personalization database” blog here, you may want to look further to see what impact the browser generated data is having on your user logon times.

This blog provides some guidance as to how to capture and analyse logon.

How to look closer at my logon times?

To investigate the impact browser data is having on your users’ logon times you will need to enable Environment Manager logging.

** Note: Enabling logging should only be done to understand the behaviour and should be switched off as soon as the relevant logs have been generated.  Logging adds additional load onto an endpoint and the timings shown may also be longer than they would normally be without logging enabled. **

The Environment Manager Client logging setup and EmMon tools can be used together to look at the different elements of the logon processing.

The required installers can be found on the UWM Product media and the installers are called EnvironmentManagerTools (the ones shown below are from the latest 2018.3 SP2 release):

To generate the appropriate Environment Manager logs the following components are required to be installed:

The EM Client Debug Setup tool which is installed can be used to enable logging on an endpoint.  Detailed instructions on how to do this are available in the Ivanti Environment Manager 2018.3 SP2 Administrative Tools Guide (this will change with different releases of course).

Once the tools have been installed the first step is to locate and launch the EM Client logging setup:

The tool has a complex interface but enabling with the settings as per the example above will keep things fairly simple.

To enable the logging, you need to click on the  icon and click ok when it changes to .

When logging has been enabled, a relevant user needs to logon so that the relevant logs are generated.

Once a log has been generated the EmMon tool can be used to analyse the logs.  Locate and launch EmMon:

When using the Environment Manager Monitor tool, first open the Log File using the  option:

Once the log has been loaded click on Find the “personalization bottlenecks” option:

This will show something like the following:

The name you need to look out for is the “EM_TASK_PMM_RESTORE_DESKTOP” to see how long it took for Environment Manager to sync down the appropriate Windows Settings data to the endpoint and restore them.  Here we see the “EM_TASK_PMM_RESTORE_DESKTOP” actions took 19s 780ms.  A breakdown of where the time was spent is also shown, in the example here we see that the Sync down from the Personalization Server took 16s 348ms and the Chrome WSG took 3s 100ms.

** Note: Some Windows Settings such as “Start Menu” and “IE10+ Settings” use an optimized process so most of the work is done before the individual Windows Settings are processed. **

And what about logoff times?

A similar process can be used to look at the logoff times.

When enabling the logging, choose the EMUserLogoff component:

Once a log of the user logoff process has been gathered, open this with the EmMon tool.

Once again use the “Find personalization bottlenecks” option:

In the example above, we see that the “EM_TASK_PMM_HIVE_DESKTOP” actions took 34s 176ms to complete.

IE11 Cookies and History (W10) took ~7.5 seconds to process, Chrome took ~8 seconds and the synchronization to the server took 13s 761ms.