You rely on XenApp, XenDesktop or Microsoft RDS to deliver Windows, Linux, web, and SaaS applications or desktops to your employees and customers on any device, anywhere. To meet changing business needs and quickly scale, most IT organizations are now supporting applications on-premise, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. In fact, 76% of workloads are expected to run in the cloud within two years (451 Research), so a growing number of organizations are moving XenApp and XenDesktop to Azure or Amazon WS or Microsoft RDS to the Azure cloud. Are you ready to continue to deliver optimal user experiences, regardless of your deployment model?
In a culture of fierce competition and high expectations, end-user experience rules. Users expect – and demand – that the performance of their virtual applications and desktops match or exceed the performance of their physical applications and desktops. Yet, delivering virtualized applications or desktops from the cloud adds a new layer of complexity to troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues. Not only are you dealing with complex virtualization technology with multi-tier components affecting user experience ( e.g. hypervisor, delivery controller, provisioning mechanism, XenApp and/or XenDesktop VDAs, Citrix database, file servers, databases…), but you also rely on a cloud platform that can introduce performance degradations. And even a slight glitch can result in user disconnects, slow logons, keystroke lags, or screen freezes—all extremely frustrating for your users. To top it all off, unlike an underperforming physical desktop frustrating a single user, a virtualization performance issue affects many users.
Here are the 5 pillars to consider as you build an optimal End-to-End Cloud Monitoring strategy:
• Since you are streaming applications within a Citrix or RDS-based environment running on premise or from the cloud, you need a testing and monitoring approach based on image recognition (object recognition will not work). All user action should be automated, tested and measured, so look for a solution that lets you capture, store and edit baseline bitmap images to define your test and monitoring scripts.
• With so many potential failure points, it is time to revamp quality and test automation. Functional testing, smoke testing and performance and load testing should be continuously embedded in your deployment cycles. As users place added demand into your Citrix or RDS environments you need to ensure readiness to handle it, regardless of your deployment model.
• Test, benchmark and compare. When migrating technology to the cloud or rolling out a new application, a good approach is to load test and baseline prior to roll-out, then load test post-deployment and compare (to ensure no performance degradation for your users). Look for the ability to reuse testing scripts for production monitoring to ensure cross-functional alignment.
• Proactively test and monitor end-to-end from your user perspective . Simulate and measure availability and response time of critical end-to-end user transactions on a 24x7x365 basis, to find problems before your users are impacted. Look for proactive user-centric monitoring that periodically executes synthetic transactions, taking user SLAs response time measurements along the way to ensure that your application are working effectively, alerting you at the first sign of trouble.
• Focus on performance analysis. Performance optimization boosts external-facing application speed and employee productivity and drives more revenue. Therefore you should benchmark and analyze application performance on an on-going basis to identify areas for improvement.
Are you ready to take your end-to-end monitoring for cloud environments (XenApp, XenDesktop, RDS) to the next level? Check out CitraTest, CitraTest APM and CitraTest VU. All you need is accessibility from a Windows client to start testing and monitoring your applications, including cloud-based applications!
Did you know that Tevron its celebrating 16th year in February 2017? Our first Citrix automation and performance measurement solution was announced back in 2011! Learn more about who is using Tevron at http://www.tevron.com/customers.aspx