See Which GPOs Are Applied to a User

Today we're going to explore the GPO processing time for our environment. The first place I go to is the Enterprise Visualizer, and here underneath the Trending Analysis, I see what my overall processing time is for my entire environment. If for some reason someone has added a new GPO and this is spiking and causing users to complain, I would be able to see an overall value here for the whole organization.

I may want to go and drill down deeper into individual machines or individual groups. So if I drill down into the Enterprise, I actually see under Boot and Login what the processing times are. If I change my perspective for Profiles and Group Policies, I will see what the processing times are for each of my individual groups. So if for some reason someone in Beijing is having more performance issues or it's taking longer for those GPOs to process, I would see that here.

I can also see the difference between system processes and user processes, and how much of the time on average for that group it's taking up. I may want to drill deeper into that and look at that individual group and look at individual machines.

So here we've switched from the Enterprise Visualizer to the Desktop Visualizer, and we'll move to that same perspective again, and we're going to see the processing time for those individual machines. I can re-sort the columns by just clicking on the top of them, and I can see which is taking up the most time to process, the system processes or the user processes.

If there's a specific machine for a user who's complaining that it's taking them a long time to log in, I can drill down into that machine. By double-clicking on that machine, I am brought directly into the Resolve component, and I can come down into Resolve and look at the boot processing for each of these individual machines.

So I can see how long the boot and login time is taking, how much it's taking for individual machines. I may want to investigate further and see which GPOs are being applied to this machine. In the All Inventory tab, I have the ability to come out here and see all the GPOs that are being applied to this machine and at what level they're being applied. Are they domain level, organization, where they are? And I can see when they were added and modified.

We have additional dashboards that will actually allow me to go further into those details. But for this individual user and this individual machine, this is the overall listing of all the GPOs that are being applied to it.

I can export this by clicking on the Export Grid, and I can get it into an XML file.

I may also want to compare this user's processing to other users. We provide a dashboard that's called Environmental GPO Processing Time, and I can go into this dashboard and be able to look at the individual groups I've created and get more insight into what's going on with those groups.

I can also see where those different processes are happening at different levels, and I can see which processes are taking under 10 seconds, between 10 and 30, and I can go and select ranges.

As I select the different machines here, I will see the different processes for those individual machines. So I'm going to come down and I'm going to select a machine. I will continue on with the same one that I had before. I will come out here and I will look for that machine, and I will come out and I will look at the processes for that individual machine.

Again, I see the GPOs, I see the registries, the different components they have, how much time it's taking to process these individuals. I get these nice graphs, and I can select the titles of those GPOs as they're affecting that individual user.

GPO processing is definitely something that I look at when I am troubleshooting user environments because it gives me better insight into whatever is affecting that end user.