Determining When a Windows System is Truly Ready for Productive Use

During a webinar, a user asked about determining when a Windows system is truly ready for productive use, and mentioned using the successful connection of OneDrive as a marker. ControlUp replied, saying that the definition of "ready" varies depending on a company’s operations, and for ControlUp, it is when the Windows Start Menu is able to render its contents or when a published application executable is started. They also mentioned that it is possible to customize a marker for a logon being complete, but it requires a data point with a time stamp, such as a windows event from OneDrive.

Read the entire ‘Determining When a Windows System is Truly Ready for Productive Use’ thread below:

Question from the webinar: "I’m particularly interested in the moment when a user can actually start working effectively. In my view, a Windows system continues to perform various background tasks even after the logon process has technically completed. What would be the most accurate metric to determine when the system is truly ready for productive use? Personally, I consider the moment OneDrive successfully connects as the marker for a complete logon."

You are 100% in your work to determine when a user is actually productive!

For your use-case, it sounds like OneDrive is critical for your operations so if it’s not operational, your users are not able to work. Different companies and operational workflows will have different "ready" states. I can tell you what we define as "ready" for ControlUp.

At ControlUp we have defined different markers for when a logon is "complete". For Published Applications we determine this to be when the published application executable is started. Naturally, this doesn’t account for the "load time" of the application and when it hits a steady state and the UI is actually able to be interacted with. For example, a published application of Excel opening a large file on a file share — ControlUp will say the logon is complete when excel.exe starts, but it may still take a minute or two until Excel actually loads the file and is operational.

For Published Desktops we consider the logon to be complete when the Windows Start Menu is able to render it’s contents. This happens after explorer.exe is started and we determined that to be a fairly good marker for when users can start to be productive, but in your use-case it might still be premature as OneDrive may not be ready at that moment.

Enabling a custom marker for when the logon is complete requires modifying the Analyze Logon Duration script. This is doable, but it does require a data point with a time stamp. If OneDrive produces a windows event in the event log for when it’s "done/ready/etc" that would be helpful, if it doesn’t then we need some other mechanism to determine when it’s "done".

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