This is a guest blog post from Rachel Berry, Technical Product Specialist, eG Innovations.
Why should CSPs care about Citrix monitoring?
Citrix Service Providers (CSPs) provide customers with flexible infrastructure and managed services for their growing remote (or hybrid/remote) workforces. Many CSPs leverage Citrix Cloud service offerings that ease the path for customers to transition to the cloud. Over the years, many Citrix Solution Advisors have also become CSPs. CSPs own and operate the Citrix services, enabling customers to focus on their core business rather than worry about Citrix performance or try to build in-house expertise to operate them.
To maintain peak user productivity and user satisfaction, CSPs need to proactively identify potential issues and take preventive action before users are impacted. If an organization with 500 remote workers experiences an outage for a couple of hours, that’s 1,000 hours of productivity lost and could cost the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What do CSPs need for Citrix monitoring?
CSPs are like Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in that they take over the burden of maintaining IT systems from customers providing expertise with Citrix and supporting technologies. Not only do they need to have expert consultants to add value, CSPs also need to have access to a portfolio of specialized tools.
One reason why traditional MSP monitoring tools like Kaseya, Datto, N-able and others are not a good fit for CSPs is that they do not have the expertise in Citrix technologies that CSPs need.
Citrix Director and many other Citrix monitoring tools are designed for use in a single customer environment. For Citrix monitoring, CSPs need:
- The ability to monitor multiple customer infrastructures from a single web console, including per-tenant views
- Self-service views, so customers can log in and track the status and performance of their Citrix services. Such customer self-service can reduce the number of tickets to the CSP.
- Monitor every layer and every tier of the Citrix service infrastructure including Citrix Delivery Controller/Citrix Cloud, Citrix StoreFront, Citrix ADC, Citrix WEM, Citrix License server, Citrix virtual apps and desktops, and the supporting infrastructure including cloud subscriptions, virtualization, storage, network, etc.
- Track all aspects of Citrix user experience including logon time, launch time, ICA RTT, network latency, monitor resource usage, and the usage of key HDX virtual channels by user.
- Access to pre-canned reports for diagnosis, compliance, and reporting including insights into who accessed the service, when, what resources they used, what applications they accessed, and more.
- Auto-discovery requiring minimal user intervention and a secure architecture requiring no/minimal changes to corporate firewalls.
eG Enterprise: Multi-Tenant Citrix Monitoring Solution for CSPs
eG Enterprise is a Citrix Ready-verified monitoring platform providing the key features that CSPs need:
- Single console across all monitoring needs — simulation, real user monitoring (RUM), reporting, physical desktops, endpoints.
- Built for CSPs with multi-tenancy, subscription-based access, and self-service capabilities. CSPs can view the state of all their customer services from one console and at the same time, drilldown into customer deployments individually.
- Flexible deployment models — Can be deployed on-premises or as SaaS. SaaS options are available in many local regions to support regulatory compliance such as GDPR.
- Designed to automate help desk workflows, custom views for L1/L2 staff, full integrations with ITSM tools such as ServiceNow and Autotask, automated out-of-the-box thresholds, alerting and root-cause analysis to reduce the need for specialist staff.
- With full internationalization support — Install on localized OS and see in your local language and your local time zone. Supporting cross-geographical organizations.
- Automated discovery and provisioning, integration with autoscaling technologies removes manual deployment effort for CSPs.
- With full API support for integration into your workflows including reports from Power BI, Tableau, etc.
- Embeds an AIOps platform that dynamically learns the normal behavior of systems over time, calculates dynamic thresholds, and provides anomaly detection. This is useful for CSPs whose customers leverage Citrix in diverse configurations with varying workloads and applications. CSP staff do not have to understand and manually tune 1,000s of Citrix metrics and alert thresholds.
- Secure universal agent technology. Agents do not listen on TCP ports, and all the agent/manager communication is over HTTPS and outbound only (from the agents to the manager), avoiding special firewall access/rules during deployment. The same agent is deployed on all servers in the infrastructure, simplifying installation.
eG Enterprise also includes multi-tenant auditing and security features and granular role-based access control (RBAC), providing secure self-service access to customers while ensuring that CSPs comply to industry standards and regulations.
With eG Innovations’ CSP program, a CSP can get started with no upfront investment, get special discounts based on volume commitment, pay-per-use with billing based on monthly peak usage. With this win-win partnership model, you just pay for what you use.
How can CSPs benefit from eG Enteprise?
- Troubleshoot issues quickly and accurately. Identify where the root causes of issues lie and resolve them. Reduce Citrix support tickets and ensure that customer SLAs are met.
- Go from being reactive to being proactive. Get alerted to problems in advance and resolve them before users notice.
- Receive capacity planning insights to plan how to scale the infrastructure to accommodate demand.
- Get insights about user and application activity and determine ways to optimize the infrastructure and maximize the digital user experience.
- Get recommendations for right-sizing virtual app servers and desktops to reduce costs.
- Augment in-house customer teams with expertise to monitor the performance of their Citrix infrastructure. Remain connected with clients and create a recurring revenue stream.
Interested in our CSP program? Contact us, or sign up for a free trial at IT Performance Monitoring Trial | eG Innovations.
