“Any daily work task that takes 5 minutes will cost over 20 hours a year, or over half of a work week. Even if it takes 20 hours to automate that daily 5 minute task, the automation will break even in a year.” ― Anthony J. Stieber
My name is Thamara Trejos, and I am a Customer Success Engineer. I help customers implement, transition and integrate new and existing virtualization environments with Citrix Cloud components.
I joined Citrix about three years ago as a Senior Frontline Engineer with the very first group of hires in the new Costa Rica office. After several months working primarily on Unix-like operating systems roles, I was able to utilize my CLI/shell knowledge to troubleshoot and solve issues for Citrix ADC. It was a different approach, but it worked great!
After a year in that role, I joined the Escalation team for Citrix Hypervisor and started focusing on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, as well and, as a result, the Windows side of our products. The latter was key to transitioning into my current role working primarily with Virtual Apps and Desktops service customers. Given my background, I have learned to leverage and truly appreciate tools that help me automate both administrator and end-user duties. And really, who doesn’t like to speed up and simplify tasks?
So, when I joined this team and heard about our Analytics service, the first question I asked was “What’s different about the Analytics service, if we already have monitoring tools like Director?” It does not come as a surprise that Director is a tab available within the Analytics console, but I quickly learned that it is so much more than that.
Here are a few aspects that make the Citrix Analytics service unique and flexible:
- Action automation: Actions taken as a result of certain conditions or events can be automated.
- Action variety: From adding users to a watch list to logging them off, recording sessions and more.
- Product variety: Analytics covers some on-premises sources and our entire Cloud portfolio. Content Collaboration, Endpoint Management, Virtual Apps and Desktops, Citrix Gateway, and even our latest addition to our Cloud offering, Citrix Access Control, a service that allows you to explicitly block, allow or redirect users when accessing certain URLs or URL categories. User sessions for all of these products can be analyzed.
- Cross-Product Actions: Actions derived from some products can be applied to sessions on other products as well.
- Flexibility: Some events can trigger an immediate action, while others will need a baseline that is built using machine learning and artificial intelligence. For instance, a rule-based event, like an EPA scan failure or a jailbroken device detection, can be used to perform an action immediately upon configuration. Other events will require a comparison between the user’s current session and the behavior collected over the course of a couple weeks and so on.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Citrix Analytics service be sure to check out the on-demand Citrix Analytics Webinar, available in our Success Center under Step 5: Manage and Optimize. During this webinar, I dive deeper into these and other important points to help get you started on your Citrix Analytics and overall Citrix Cloud journey. Our Cloud Success Center site has documents, detailed guides and videos on many cloud services, and we keep adding more contents regularly, so be sure to bookmark it!
If you want to read more on the basic concepts around Analytics, check out this blog post.
I hope this helps to pique your interest in Analytics service so that you can gain the benefits derived from configuring automated actions applied to unexpected behaviors in your user sessions very soon. Thanks for reading!
