Springtime is here (at least for us folks in the Northern Hemisphere). For many areas, it’s a time when landscapes start regrowth after the cold, harsh winter months. Trees regain their green leaves. Flowers begin blooming bright. Spring is also a time to do some tidying up — the house, the yard, the car. It’s also a great time to tidy up your IT environment and put a plan in place to keep it running its best. Citrix Analytics for Performance is the perfect tool to help do just that. It can help you to proactively optimizing any Citrix virtual app and desktop delivery infrastructure.
Citrix Analytics for Performance enables admins to maximize the investment in their on-premises and/or cloud-based Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environments. It visually surfaces the answers to fundamental questions such as, “Which users are not experiencing excellent performance and why?” and “What is the true availability of the environment and why?” In a world with an increasingly distributed workforce, Citrix Analytics for Performance is uniquely positioned to provide organizations with the insights for success. Companies like Compeer Financial have realized substantial value with Citrix Analytics for Performance when they needed it most.
Speaking of value, Citrix Analytics for Performance has a very active roadmap of innovative capabilities. In this blog post, I’ll dive into key capabilities we’ve released over the past few months, including use cases. They’re all very helpful in “tidying up” your environment and keeping it running its best.
Detecting Overloaded Machines
One common cause of poor user experience in a virtualized environment is overloaded machines/VDAs. Even with properly configured advanced load balancing algorithms, it’s often impossible to tell which users will do what within a session. To put it another way, for a given set of knowledge worker users, we simply don’t know which ones will consume more resources and which ones less among a given shared host. Plus there’s the “noisy neighbor” scenario, when one user is consuming excessive resources (e.g. Excel macro) and affecting other users on the shared host. (This often results in help desk calls, which cost your company money.)
Citrix Analytics for Performance detects overloaded machines and allows you to drill into the details further. Uncover why your machines are overloaded and then fix it with a solution like Citrix Workspace Environment Management. I did a YouTube video on detecting overloaded machines, as well as a more in-depth Citrix Tech Zone Live session on “noisy neighbors” and using Citrix WEM to address. You can watch both below.
In the image below, we see a specific machine that hit nearly 100 percent CPU peak and that has a number of sessions with a poor UX score. Citrix Analytics for Performance helps to easily visualize this and allows admins to drill in further to correct (click image to view larger).
Failure Insights
User connections to VDAs can fail at times due to a variety of reasons. Citrix Analytics for Performance visually displays session failures over time and automatically classifies failures into two major categories: black hole machines and communication errors. Black hole machines are VDAs where user connection attempts are made though the VDA is not accepting them for whatever reason. Citrix Analytics detects this type of failure and offers helpful advice to correct. Communication failures can occur across multiple components in the connection process: endpoint, network, gateway, or backend infrastructure. Citrix Analytics for Performance detects these types of failures and allows admins to drill in further to correct.
Availability Insights
Understanding the overall availability of your environment is a fundamental question that needs answering to ensure money is well spent and users remain productive. We’ve always had the native ability to ensure VDAs are registering with controllers and what connection trends look like; however, that doesn’t translate to overall availability. Citrix Analytics for Performance provides a true availability insights dashboard that clearly shows the availability (and unavailability) of the environment. There’s specific categories that allow admins to further drill into the unavailable portion and understand why they were unavailable. Plus the ability to filter by time and delivery group. Track, understand, and optimize — all with Citrix Analytics for Performance.
Self-Service Improvements
The self-service area of Citrix Analytics is where admins build queries on the rich dataset — for both performance and security. Admins can save commonly run queries and results are easily downloaded for import into other tools. Now, when you run queries across certain datasets, we will provide visualizations directly in the results to allow for spotting trends far easier.
For datasets that are presented in tabular format, we color-code specific metrics in grey (good), orange (fair), or red (poor) so you can easily spot which areas need attention. Something like this may seem trivial, but has already proved to save significant time for admins.
Machine Actions
Most of the tasks performed within Citrix Analytics for Performance are centered around uncovering insights from data. Now there’s one to take action, and it helps to save time while preventing context switching. You can now take action on VDAs. If machines are overloaded or just not working correctly, you can quickly enable maintenance mode and begin to drain users or restart the machine — all without having to transition to Citrix Director.
Executive-Level Reports
Upper management needs high-level visibility to ensure that the delivery infrastructure is meeting established KPIs and business objectives. Manually producing reports on a regular basis is both time-consuming and error-prone. Citrix Analytics for Performance makes this requirement easy by allowing scheduling of saved queries to email contents at a selected cadence. Now you can have reports ready for a daily IT standup or weekly or monthly trending reports.
Get Started Today!
I’ve covered quite a few innovative new features, but there’s so much more to Citrix Analytics for Performance. My recommendation is to try it for yourself. Kick off a demo or run a free trial from Citrix Cloud today. See what insights and recommendations Citrix Analytics for Performance can deliver in your environment as you “tidy” things up. Got a question or comment? Leave it below.
