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IT Best Practices: Monitoring cloud deployments from your users’ perspective

Posted on April 1, 2014 by info@tevron.com

Enterprise cloud spending is expected to triple by 2017, and reach $235.1 billion (Source: IHS), so if you are not already there, it is very likely that you soon will be moving to the cloud.

Today IT success is measured on the value you deliver to the business, and how well you service the end-users you support. Consequently, regardless where your applications are deployed, on premise or the cloud –outside your control–, IT is ultimately responsible for end-user experience. Do you want to successfully move to the cloud and avoid business disruptions and end-user escalations and complaints?

Here are some quick guidelines to help ensure cloud migration success for enterprise IT teams:

1. Properly evaluate your cloud provider. Did you know that Gartner is predicting that 1 in 4 cloud providers will gone under by 2015? Therefore, think long-term, do your prep work carefully, don’t skimp time on your selection process, and closely evaluate key areas like:

Current/future cloud locations: It is best to span your cloud architecture across multiple locations to mitigate outage risks. In addition, if your organization operates in Europe, be aware that the EU (European Union) Data Protection Act mandates keeping personal information within the EU, so you need a cloud vendor with global coverage.
Data format considerations: Think about in which format your data will be stored, and more importantly, prevention is the best cure, so plan to keep a local copy, or at least instant data access, in case your cloud provider goes under.
Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plans. For example, evaluate automatic back-up capabilities, and consider an architecture that lets you store back-up data and applications locally, and across cloud locations for added protection.
Security. This is a critical area, especially if you are planning to move to the cloud sensitive application data that fall under regulatory compliance (e.g. HR records, patient information, credit card data, financial records, etc.). Therefore, carefully assess providers’ security mechanisms (e.g. Intrusion detection and prevention systems, spam and virus filters, role-based access, SSL tunneling, etc.), examine independent 3^rd party audit reports, and make sure you understand who is ultimately responsible for the security of your data.

2. Consider a phased-approach — don’t move all applications at once! Less is more. Start small, moving less critical applications first to make sure that you get it right, and everything is working as expected. In addition plan to test and measure application performance, from your users’ perspective, BEFORE you move to the cloud to baseline your performance, and AFTER your migration is completed. That way you can compare performance pre and post-cloud deployments, and take corrective actions as needed.

3. Monitor application performance, from your end-user perspective, from the get go. Since application content will traverse a complex path of interrelated entities inside and outside your control zone – datacenters, private and public clouds, remote sites and locations, 3rd-party services and components – there will be more potential bottlenecks and failure points that can impact end-to-end application performance, as perceived by your users. Consequently, proactively monitor your applications from your users’ perspective to find problems before they do.

4. Don’t assume that your cloud vendor will take care of overseeing application availability and performance. While your business colleagues may think they can buy cloud services and instantly meet all their requirements, you know better. Your operational requirements won’t change, regardless of where your applications are deployed. If the cloud provider doesn’t fully meet your requirements, you have to fill the gap, so proactively monitor your SLAs to ensure quality and predictability, for all users at all times.

5. Keep all stakeholders in the know. Look for an application performance solution that gives you custom reports and automatic email distribution capabilities (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) by application, by transaction step, by location, a summary of SLA violations, etc. That way you can easily access and share information across cross-functional teams and stakeholders and keep everybody aligned, a must for cloud deployments.

Are you ready to ensure cloud migration success?

If you haven’t done so yet, check out Tevron’s CitraTest APM, an enterprise-class user centric monitoring solution for ALL your applications, regardless of where they are deployed: datacenters, private and public clouds. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and taking response time measurements along the way, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of a cloud-based or on premise application or service are available and working effectively for your users, instantly alerting you at the first sign of trouble.

Use Tevron’s CitraTest APM to:

Baseline application performance prior to cloud migration
Proactively monitor application performance post-cloud deployment
Be the first to know you have an application performance problem, slowdown or bottleneck
Resolve issues before large volumes of users are impacted
Validate your SLAs, from an end-user perspective, by application, by transaction step and by location
Keep everybody aligned and your business humming

Good luck with your cloud initiatives!

Mitigate risks- Monitoring VMWare from your end-users perspective

Posted on March 7, 2014 by info@tevron.com

If you are reading this, you may be one of the 69% of enterprise organizations that are planning to increase cloud spending in 2013 and 2014 (Source: 451 Research). And for 35% of those organizations, building an internal private cloud is #1 priority.

With huge benefits such as datacenter consolidation and reduced hardware cost, energy efficiency, rapid time-to-value, deployment agility — and a low overall TCO —, enterprise IT teams are embracing virtualization technologies like VMware as the ideal platform for the deployment of new and existing applications. Yet virtualization is also disruptive technology driving the transformation of IT, which means that there are some risks associated with it.

Virtualization challenges and risks for IT enterprise teams

VMware offers full/native virtualization by inserting a brand new layer of software directly on the computer hardware or within the hosted operating system, and therefore, introducing a brand new set of potential points of failure for your applications. In addition, triage and troubleshooting will be harder, since the average deployment ratio for enterprise customers is 6 virtual servers per physical host. Just do the math- it will be much harder to rapidly locate root cause of performance issues in a virtualized environment.

In addition, VMWare has done a good job in terms of measuring the additional overhead that the virtualization layer introduces to individual physical servers for key performance metrics such as CPU usage, memory, network, or timing. While these metrics are a good reference to start your planning, they don’t provide a complete indicator of the overall impact that a virtualized underlying infrastructure will have on end-to-end application performance, as perceived by your end-users. And this is a huge risk, since IT success is directly determined by how well they service the end-users they support. Therefore, monitoring application availability and response time from your users’ perspective is more critical in a virtualized world!

Here are some quick tips to help you get started.

1) Monitor end-to-end application availability and response time — pre and post-virtualization deployment— from your user perspective. For example, if you are working in healthcare, you should monitor end-to-end access to healthcare data by clinicians (log-in, retrieve a patient record, add information, save and log-out). Similarly if you are a retailer you should continuously oversee your shopping cart (log-in, browse catalog, add to shopping cart, enter credit card information and log-out).

2) Closely oversee physical and virtual resources such as VMs, CPU, interface, memory, and disk utilization on the back-end.

3) Put strict controls in place for VM creation to reduce the risk of virtual sprawl (or the rapid proliferation of virtual servers in your organization). For example, just like you probably have a “new hire form” when an employee starts, consider establishing a new formal process to govern VM creation and deletion.

4) Use Resource pools allowing production servers to take precedence over hardware.

5) Overlay compliance and data security policies and organizational and management requirements. Follow the motto that “a virtual server is still a server”, with all the policies and security and management concerns of a physical box.

Are you ready to monitor virtualized applications from your users’ perspective and find problems before they do?

Check out Tevron’s CitraTest APM: 24x7x365 proactive end-user centric monitoring for ALL your applications, regardless of where they are deployed –datacenters, private and/or public clouds.

By automating the driving of ANY virtualized application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and taking response time measurements along the way, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of a virtualized application or service are available and working effectively for your users, instantly alerting you at the first sign of trouble. Combine that with CitraTest APM’s deep visibility into back-end performance metrics for physical and virtual resources and you will have all the information you need to troubleshoot, analyze and correct performance issues –before your users are impacted.

Plus no additional new add-ons purchasing is required if your needs evolve and you want to monitor new applications –every application is supported with Tevron’s powerful one solution / one investment model.
Just check out the full list of supported environments here.

Good luck with your VMWare deployment!

IT Best Practices: Application Monitoring Based on Real User Experience

Posted on February 21, 2014 by info@tevron.com

The relation between IT and the business has changed. Today your success is measured on the value you deliver to your organization, and how well you service the end-users you support. Unfortunately your job has never been so challenging. You are responsible for hundreds of legacy, packaged and custom applications deployed across datacenters and cloud locations, remote sites and branches, each one with a distinctive underlying technology, a different purpose, and a unique set of users, requirements and problem-points.

Traditional infrastructure-centric application performance monitoring (APM) solutions give you valuable insight into key server performance metrics (e.g. CPU usage, disk, memory, processor queue length…), but they are no longer enough to assure optimal user experiences and customer satisfaction. In fact, you will be operating in the dark when it comes to key performance metrics that are crucial to your users: application availability and response time.

Did you know that the IT department is unaware of 75% of all application problems until they are escalated from the help desk (Source: Forrester)?

Here are some samples of common problems that you will miss with a traditional infrastructure-centric monitoring approach.

An application is not available. Just see below some sample screenshots of the errors your users could encounter when interacting with your applications. These are “hidden” problems for infrastructure-centric APM solutions.
Slow response time. For example a key business operation process such as “open a lead record” (critical for your sales operations) is starting to degrade and slows-down. Unless you continuously monitor and validate key transactions as users do (e.g. logging, open sales record, add new customer log activity, logout), you will never know that there is a problem until the first complaint arrives at your helpdesk.
Geographical response time discrepancies across users. For example, remote office employees are seeing time out errors when accessing a terminal-based application or an HR application is slow for users logging in from outside headquarters. There are all situations only visible when monitoring and comparing application response time across locations.
SLA violations and problematic trends. Without user-centric monitoring in place you will not be able to baseline application performance, let alone track, measure and validate your SLAs over time. For example a key EHR transaction, add a new patient record or access a patient record, is not meeting SLAs. This type of problem is only visible when you are monitoring your applications from an end-user perspective.
End-user requests fail to complete. For example, an overloaded CRM application times out, or a Citrix server is unable to process user requests. These types of problems are also invisible when your monitoring strategy is centered on the underlying infrastructure.

Instead, when you rely on Application Performance Monitoring solutions centered on User Experience you gain:

Complete end-to-end transaction visibility, from the moment an end-user clicks until the transaction is completed
Proactive problem identification much earlier, before large volumes of users are already impacted
A unified view across IT and business metrics

This is why 81% of organizations are exploring a user-centric approach for managing IT (Source: TRAC Research).

Join the ranks and learn more about Tevron’s CitraTest APM: one end-user centric monitoring solution for ALL your applications. 100% non-intrusive monitoring that will not impact your production applications or change your application code. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and taking response time measurements along the way, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of an application or service are available and working effectively for your users, instantly alerting you at the first sign of trouble. Plus all the information you need to troubleshoot, analyze or report is available via an intuitive role-based web console, accessible anytime, anywhere.

Good luck with your monitoring!

Mitigate risks – Load Test your Citrix/ Microsoft Terminal Services environments!

Posted on February 6, 2014 by info@tevron.com

You rely on Citrix, Microsoft Terminal Services & Remote Desktop Services (RDS) applications to run your business and day-to-day operations. From supporting virtualization initiatives via Citrix XenServer, facilitating real-time access to healthcare or financial data from any device to clinicians, bankers and tellers via Citrix XenDesktop, centralizing applications in your datacenter via XenApp, or supporting ecommerce via Microsoft Terminal Services integration, your success hinges on your ability to ensure your applications perform optimally for all your users, at all times. For example, AT&T relies on Microsoft Terminal Servers to run tests in real time from anywhere in the world, a business-critical function for them.

So….what happens when your Citrix servers or Microsoft Terminal Services are over-strained??

When external-facing applications underperform at peak times, there is a clear connection between revenue lost and brand damage. For instance, the launch of a new collection from designer Isabel Marant crashed H&M Website as shoppers rushed to shop. Similarly, underperforming internal applications also damage an organization’s bottom-line. In this case, H&M relies on Citrix to support internal operations and employee-scheduling system across 1,300 stores and 30,000 employees. If Citrix underperforms, H&M operations will be severely hindered, and IT productivity will be lost as the team goes into triage and troubleshooting mode.

Financial organizations recently had costly and visible externally-facing Web operations failures. For example, E*TRADE online services were down due to a spike in traffic, and the Royal Bank of Scotland faced a glitch on Cyber Monday that prevented customers from using their debit cards online or elsewhere, putting holiday sales shopping on halt. Both of these organizations rely on Citrix to run their business operations. Specifically, Royal Bank of Scotland is powered by Citrix virtual computing (65,000 desktops and 2,000 applications globally).

Wouldn’t it be better to triage and resolve overloaded Citrix/MTS issues early on, before large volumes of users are impacted?

That is exactly what you can do with load testing. With a best-in-class load testing solution such as Tevron’s CitraTest VU, you can test and optimize Citrix/RDS application performance under multiple load levels, and ensure quality Web experiences, for all users, at all times – under all load conditions. This is how it works:

In server-based environments, an image of the application is delivered to the client UI. This is why CitraTest VU relies on advanced intelligent image recognition capabilities –automatically built into every testing script – to simplify testing configuration, and reduce time and efforts on your side.
“Load generating machines” are used to generate user load against the server environment under test, while “measuring machines” actively measure response times and gather server performance metrics on the back-end. With Tevron’s unique image recognition approach, you can consistently generate virtual user activity across Citrix client interfaces or Microsoft TS/RDP client interfaces.
During load testing execution, CitraTest VU replicates real user activity and measures and reports end-to-end response times at the client GUI by automatically comparing the screen to baseline response images created during load test script development. That way, you can baseline and compare application performance under different virtual user load levels, for each application. With CitraTest VU, the most important metric is measured and analyzed – the end-to-end client side response time, so you can verify that service level requirements are met for all pre-defined levels of concurrent users. And remember, no software is ever installed in your production environment!

Even if you are not supporting external facing applications, your internal applications can also choke at peak times. After all, IT environments are living entities where the number of users, remote branches and locations, business requirements, load levels and users’ expectations can change at lightning speed. So load test your applications to ensure IT and application readiness for whatever changes come your way! Check-out Tevron’s CitraTest VU today.

Good luck with your load testing efforts!

The secret recipe for optimal Citrix performance? End-User Centric Monitoring!

Posted on January 27, 2014 by info@tevron.com

As an IT pro, and the first line of defense when issues arise, we are sure you’ve heard many pesky complains such as “Citrix XenDesktop is not working” or “Citrix is slow”. Well, things could get much worse! Nowadays, 74% of external users and 73% of internal users expect faster applications (Forrester Research). Wouldn’t it be great to change the situation and identify Citrix problems and bottlenecks, much earlier, before issues arrive to your helpdesk?

That is exactly what proactive Application Performance Monitoring (APM), such as Tevron’s CitraTest APM can do for you.

In summary, best-of-class APM User-centric Monitoring solutions are designed to:

Execute synthetic transactions (or multi-step user interaction with your applications) on a 24x7x365 basis, taking response time measurements along the way, and alerting you at the first sign of trouble.
Automatically drive your Citrix applications — just like a real user would– visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse, etc. so you can ensure that your Citrix services are available and working effectively.
Give you access to all the information you need to analyze, troubleshoot and report via a web console.
Deliver 100% non-intrusive monitoring that will not impact your production applications.
Provide the ability to monitor Citrix environments as well as any other application you support (legacy, client server, web-based, terminal emulation, Big Data, home-grown…)

Are you ready to start your Citrix monitoring journey? Here are some quick tips to help you get started:

Identify critical Citrix transactions to monitor, including mission-critical functions, common user paths, and end-to-end processes that support business operations. For example, if you are working in healthcare, you should monitor access to healthcare data by clinicians, so a monitoring script could be Citrix XenDesktop log-in, retrieve a patient record, add information, save and log-out. Don’t forget to build comprehensive monitoring scenarios with custom grouping based on physical locations (Headquarters, NYC, remote office locations, etc.) to identify geographical discrepancies across users and locations.
Define notifications policies, including how frequently you want to test your Citrix transactions, who should be alerted if warning/critical threshold are breached, and the number of threshold violations that will trigger an alert (to eliminate noise). Consider centralizing all APM alerting into existing management frameworks to increase efficiency and accelerate incident response procedures.
Measure and verify your SLAs. For example, SLAs for Citrix load time, how long it takes after a “button” is clicked or until the next window appears, and so on. That way you can understand how each application performs end-to-end, including granular step performance, historically and in real-time, and identify underperforming components or problematic trends.
Triage and troubleshoot. When a monitoring script fails, your monitoring solution should take a screenshot to help you analyze root-cause. Therefore, look for capabilities to click and analyze recent incident grids and trace logs, and visualize script failure logs in sequence to intuitively see what went wrong.
Monitor back-end server performance across your datacenter and private/public clouds. Key server performance indicators to track include application load level, server load level, memory, CPU, sessions and processor queue length. That way you can ensure that you have enough resources to handle your user requests.
Keep all stakeholders in the know. Look for the ability to create custom reports and automatic email distribution (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) by application, by transaction step, by location, by SLA violations, etc., so you can easily share the information that team members and stakeholders need. After all, C-level executives value APM data (even though, according to CIO magazine, many of them are still struggling to become data-driven businesses).

In addition, problem prevention is a better cure. Your Citrix applications should go through a thorough performance testing cycle in pre-production and production environments. Check out how our complimentary load testing solution–CitraTest VU – can help you ensure optimal Citrix performance under all load levels. And one last point. Every application is supported with Tevron’s 1 solution / 1 investment model, so CitraTest can help you ensure quality user experiences for ALL your applications.

Good luck in your Citrix monitoring journey!