This is a guest post by Vinod Mohan, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, eG Innovations.
Digital workspaces are one of the most performance-sensitive IT services in enterprise- and service-provider networks today. A small glitch anywhere in the infrastructure can result in user logon failures, disconnects, screen freezes, and more, affecting user productivity and having an impact on revenue. IT operations teams must move from monitoring resources (i.e. looking at CPU, memory, and disk utilization) to monitoring the user experience.
At the same time, it’s important to realize that user experience is not just about users getting a fast response. After all, what’s the use of a fast response if a user’s connectivity is not reliable and their session keeps disconnecting? Ensuring a great Citrix user experience also requires:
- Proactiveness of monitoring: For a long time, Citrix admins have operated in a reactive mode. According to an eG Innovations survey, 60 percent of Citrix admins say they need the ability to proactively track user experience and troubleshoot problems faster. As the rest of IT operations advances at a fast pace, Citrix admins can’t afford to lag. In the era of automation and artificial intelligence, Citrix admins must find ways to proactively detect user experience issues.
- Troubleshooting and resolving issues quickly: It’s impossible to maintain an error-free production environment. Changes to app configurations and workload patterns, failure of hardware and software components, patches, and updates are just a few of the many things that can cause user experience issues. Citrix admins must make sure that when problems occur, they get resolved quickly.
- Diagnosing issues accurately: If the same issue occurs repeatedly, it will lead to unhappy users and will affect the credibility of the Citrix team. When problems do occur, they need to be diagnosed accurately (Is the issue in the network, or the server, or the app, or the virtualization platform, or the Citrix stack?) and resolved so the same problems don’t reoccur. The increased adoption of cloud computing only makes this more challenging because there are now many elements of the service delivery chain that aren’t within the Citrix admin’s direct control.
- Effective planning and optimization: When the workload on your Citrix farm increases, you must ensure that the user experience is unaffected. This requires that you understand the utilization levels of every tier of the infrastructure, know where the hotspots are, and plan for capacity increases in advance.
Until now, Citrix admins have mainly focused on the nuts and bolts like resources and utilization levels. Making user experience central to the monitoring strategy is key to the success of digital workspace initiatives. This also enables better alignment with the priorities of IT managers and executives.
eG Enterprise: Providing a 360o View of UX for Citrix Workspace
At Citrix Summit 2020, eG Innovations, a longtime Citrix Ready partner, will showcase the latest release (version 7) of its flagship product, eG Enterprise, which offers a complete user experience monitoring and management solution for Citrix workspaces.
With eG Enterprise, Citrix admins can:
- Monitor all aspects of Citrix user experience for on-prem and cloud workspaces: Using a combination of synthetic and real user monitoring, Citrix admins can track all aspects of user experience such as Citrix ADC/Citrix StoreFront logon time; Active Directory authentication time; Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops session start-up time; breakdown of session start-up times, including profile loading time; GPO processing time and logon script execution time; application launch time; user input delay while accessing apps; and screen-refresh latency. A new geographical mapping capability also enables administrators to view performance by geo location.
- Monitor every layer and every tier of the Citrix workspace infrastructure: This includes monitoring of activities and performance of every Citrix tier including Citrix ADC, virtual app servers, virtual desktops, license server, provisioning services, Citrix StoreFront, and more. At the same time, eG Enterprise also tracks the performance of Citrix Workspace Environment Management, Citrix App Layering, and Citrix SD-WAN to enable Citrix admins to detect and highlight any performance anomalies caused by these new technology tiers. User experience issues may also result from bottlenecks in the supporting infrastructure — Active Directory, profile servers, virtualization and cloud environments, storage, database servers, or even the backend applications. eG Enterprise provides a single pane of glass from where the performance of the Citrix tiers and the other tiers supporting the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service can be monitored.
- Correlate performance across the Citrix and non-Citrix tiers and pinpoint the root cause of problems: A patented root-cause diagnosis engine embedded in eG Enterprise enables it to correlate, in real-time, performance across the different tiers of the service delivery chain and highlight where the root cause of a problem lies. This helps Citrix admins to resolve problems accurately, preventing their recurrence and a negative impact on user experience.
- Get insights for optimization, right-sizing and capacity planning: Unlike real-time monitoring solutions that focus only on the current, eG Enterprise stores historical metrics and provides insights and analytics that help admins to make informed decisions. They can perform a “what if” analysis and determine how many more servers they need to support the expected workload. They can also get recommendations on where and in what quantity additional resources need to be added, as well as the resulting additional capacity. Using these capabilities, your Citrix operations will become analytical, intelligent, and effective.
Learn more about eG Innovations’ Citrix user experience monitoring solution, and get a free trial and request a demo.
Reach the Summit of User Experience with eG Innovations
eG Innovations is a Silver Sponsor at Citrix Summit 2020 in Orlando, Florida. Visit booth #405 on January 13 and 14 to learn more about how eG Innovations can help you and your Citrix admin team ensure a great user experience for your users and achieve digital workspace success. Also, Citrix will use eG Enterprise to monitor the Citrix workspaces being used for the demo labs, keynotes and training classes. Be sure to stop by the Citrix Experience Center to see eG Enterprise in action.
Watch this video to learn how eG Innovations can help Citrix customers. Contact info@eginnovations.com if you have any questions.
