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I have a number of users who connect to Published Applications over the internet. (Workers work from home). On any given day, user A can stay connected to the remote app with no disconnections for 8 hours, no problem. On the same day, user B may be disconnected 10-15 times during the exact same time period.

This is oversimplifying a good deal - there are many users who are fine, and many users with disconnections at different times of the day. (If everyone got disconnected at the same time, I could wrap my head around the idea of it being an issue on the server/our network).

My question is: how does one go about troubleshooting this? Their computers are all company provided. However, users are responsible for their own router/firewall/internet providers. They of course will call their internet provider, who will in turn "test their connection", and they'll be told that their connection is fine.

So I need to be able to show WHAT is happening (both to the user and to myself), so that I can then troubleshoot further.

I've toyed with the idea of running Network Monitor/Wireshark, but honestly, I'm not real sure WHAT I'm looking for.

Anyone have any troubleshooting tips/tricks to share?

user2808741
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    I would first have them use the machine at another location, such as public wifi to see if it's the ISP. If that works, get details on the problem users' home ISPs and have them run diagnostics on the connections. Then move inward to any routers/firewalls the user has at home and go so far as to have them directly connect to the modem and bypass any wireless or secondary routers. Another idea is to check the power settings on the machines to make sure the network adapters aren't allowed to go to sleep. A lot of variables to look at but this is where I'd start. – Mike Naylor Mar 28 '14 at 15:06
  • If userA stays connected and userB does not then more than likely the problem is on userB's side (and any other user experiencing the problem). My first step would be to do as Mike suggested and have userB connect from a different physical location to see if the problem recurs. – joeqwerty Mar 28 '14 at 17:35
  • Thanks - you're just confirming what I suspected - Unfortunately, dealing with end users, they don't get why browsing the internet seems to be fine (because dropped packets aren't as big a deal), but they lose connection to something like this. – user2808741 Mar 28 '14 at 18:48

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I would get some sort of ping monitoring tool such as Ping Plotter or equivalent. Start a ping to your RDS gateway, a ping to 8.8.8.8 (or equivalent), a second ping going to a random website that responds to ICMP (cnn.com for example) and a ping to another Internet facing server in your organization. Then monitor the loss of connections. If the loss is on all targets then it's easy to point the finger at the user's config (ISP, router, computer... whatever it may be).

Charlie Wilson
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