Tevron – Page 3 – Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Application Monitoring (APM), Performance Testing, Intelligent Automation

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Remote Desktop Services

Posted on September 9, 2019 by info@tevron.com

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Remote Desktop Services

Calling all Users of Remote Desktop Services

Do you regularly use Remote Desktop Client Services? Perhaps you work in healthcare and are focused on interoperability with the goal of ensuring that your legacy system can exchange information with a new application platform? Maybe, you work in the financial sector and need to transfer zillions of customer records into a new system?

What to do?

What’s the smartest approach? Of course, one option is to hire a team of consultants to read and parse the data, check for duplicates, and transfer the data into the new database. Another solution might be to transfer the data manually with assigned teams reading one screen while simultaneously entering data into the other system. The problem is that both options are time consuming and expensive with a high risk of error. There are also data privacy laws to comply with plus the issue of software compatibility and the likely need to invest in middleware. Don’t despair! We have good news for you!

Intelligent interface with rich functionality

Meet Tevron’s CitraTest RPA, which is revolutionizing and disrupting robotic process automation in the remote desktop services market. Unlike competitive tools, which are simplistic in their approach and incapable of analysing objects or the underlying environment, we provide an intelligent interface with rich functionality, capable of supporting dynamic variables. CitraTest RPA features OCR, locates regions of the screen in 2D, supports different resolutions, provides anchor text, allows you to write customized scripts in Visual Basic, and excels in zoom in-and-out functionality.

Designed from the ground up

While the competition has tried to emulate what we do through add-ons, our approach has been to design this superior functionality into the product from the get-go. As a result, there are no half-measures or work-arounds. After all, there are horses for courses. We provide a resilient, high-performing solution, fit for purpose, which can scale cost effectively to meet your needs. With CitraTest RPA, we provide you with a development toolkit – a library of functions and utilities that you can customize to drive your own applications in line with your own business needs.

Make your remote, truly local

CitraTest RPA

We design powerful tools for your hands

www.tevron.com

For more information or to schedule a demo, please visit

https://tevron.com/robotic-process-automation-citratest-rpa.aspx.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Citrix

Posted on March 14, 2019 by info@tevron.com

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Citrix

Perhaps, you work in a bank or healthcare company and need to transfer a million customer or patient records into a new system. What’s the best solution? How do you go about it quickly and effectively? One option is to hire a team of consultants to read and parse the data, check for duplicates, and dump the data into the new database. Another solution might be to transfer the data manually with assigned teams reading one screen while simultaneously entering data into the other system.

The problem is that both options are time consuming and expensive with a high risk of error. There are also data privacy laws to comply with plus the issue of software compatibility and the likely need to invest in middleware.

Surely, there is a better way? Meet Tevron’s CitraTest RPA – the ideal answer for real user automation scenarios. You know your own business processes better than anyone. In response, we’ve created tools to empower you to write your own customized scripts in Visual Basic. With CitraTest RPA, we provide you with a development toolkit – a library of functions and utilities that you can customize to drive your own applications in line with your business needs.

Use CitraTest RPA to develop software bots that will transfer the data from one system to the next, efficiently and accurately in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. CitraTest RPA also features powerful OCR functionality to recognize and convert text on Citrix client machines into characters that can be sent as keystrokes to the target machine. As CitraTest RPA is image based, it works like a dream with Citrix, sending keystrokes, mouse movements and mouse clicks, analyzing what’s on the screen and waiting for the status to change. Our advanced solution enters data just like a real user would but without the risk of errors.

Citrix is a wonderfully, supportive environment as it’s software-agnostic and sits on top of every application without interference. It generates minimal traffic on the network – the only data sent back from the server is a picture. You enjoy centralized software installation and updates. As multiple users can run on a single server, you can use thin clients and minimize the need to invest in costly hardware.

Tevron is a global leader in RPA. Our solutions are successfully deployed across multiple vertical industries. Our customer portfolio includes industry giants such as the General Dynamics, Xerox, T-Mobile, Con Edison, T-Systems, Marathon Oil, and Alcon Labs to name a few.

For more information or to schedule a demo, please visit https://tevron.com/robotic-process-automation-citratest-rpa.aspx.

Automate Any Process

Posted on February 2, 2019 by info@tevron.com

Automate Any Process

Are you ready? In 2019, Forrester Research predicts that automation will become the tip of the digital transformation spear, impacting everything from infrastructure to customers to business models. Researchers say automation will become central to business strategy and operations, driving new standards of customer experience such as deeper personalization, higher quality, faster delivery and greater convenience. This is not just an IT phenomenon – we believe that automation will extend to every, single industry sector.

The big question for you, what are the implications for your business? Our take-away is that software automation can transform your business, allowing you to thrive versus survive.

Tevron’s CitraTest RPA® is the leading solution for automating business workflows and repeatable processes. Using CitraTest RPA, you can reduce costs and improve accuracy while freeing up your employees for value-add, strategic work. Experience shows that automation improves the overall employee experience, eliminating tedious tasks. You can manage any variety and number of processes from the simple to the most complex. Think of your software bots as a virtual workforce that can crunch through big projects and deliver accurate and fast results For example, an IT customer, tasked with moving 60,000 records manually with a team of six was scheduled to work on the project over several weeks. Using CitraTest® RPA, the work was completed in just four days.

Our RPA robots can mimic human user actions, such as clicking on links, making calculations, moving files and folders, copying and pasting data, filling in forms, reading, writing and extracting data etc. You can automate applications like data entry, card activation, fraud claim discovery, report automation and data migration.

CitraTest RPA is application-agnostic, non-intrusive and sits on top of your existing IT infrastructure – there is no need for specialist hardware investment or worry about disruption to existing operations. It works across every development environment and is compatible with EVERY Windows-based application plus EVERY application that is accessible via Windows. Our powerful image and optical character recognition (OCR) technology is automatically embedded in each script. In fact, we even provide a Visual Studio Extension to help you get going and develop customized scripts.

And, there’s no need to worry about the future. CitraTest RPA® features state-of-the-art security. Add extra software bots at any stage with minimal investment. And CitraTest RPA allows you to introduce basic AI functionality, which is important as RPA technology will combine over the medium-term with AI and Machine Learning to execute more complex tasks.

Tevron® is a global leader in automation, a company you can trust. Our customer portfolio includes industry giants such as Xerox, Fujitsu Services, John Deere, T-Systems, Con Edison and Ameriprise Financial.

CitraTest RPA and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Set to Revolutionize the IT World

Posted on October 3, 2018 by info@tevron.com

For all IT people out there, the good news is that the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is heating up fast and is expected to reach $2.9 Billion by 2021 (Forrester). Irrespective of your IT department, this promises to revolutionize your workload.

A virtual workforce
Think about it! You will be able to rely on robots, bots or software agents that are programmed to perform repetitive rules-based tasks across systems and applications, fully capable of emulating human activity. For example, a bot can login and navigate enterprise applications (ERP systems, Web and legacy applications, etc.), fill out forms, capture and manipulate data, trigger appropriate responses and communicate with other systems, using the interface like a real human would. In this new world, any workflow or repeatable business-rules driven processes, such as data entry, card activation, fraud claim discovery, report automation, data migration are candidates for RPA.

Dramatically improve efficiencies
This is a massive win-win for IT. Using a “virtual workforce” or a BotFarm – a deployment of RPA robots or software processes executing automation scripts – you can boost productivity and efficiency, eliminate tedious tasks, free up time for strategic activities and realize significant cost savings for your organization. To give you a flavor, an IT team tasked with moving 60,000 records manually with a team of six people planning to work on it for countless weeks was able to easily complete the project in just four days with CitraTest RPA.

Automating manual tasks
How does this all work? In a nutshell, CitraTest RPA technology automates manual tasks (or user-driven interactions) by remaining a background operation that generates real mouse activity and keyboard strokes against the target application and then responds to the images on the screen – just like a real user. With CitraTest RPA, every user action can be replicated and automated (for example, clicking on, comparing, verifying and awaiting displaying images), and you capture, store and edit baseline bitmap images to define your automation scripts for your bots.

CitraTest RPA is powerful and flexible
This ability to work with images and image recognition instead of objects is critical in Citrix as no underlying objects or controls are delivered to the client. Instead, the server sends screen images to the end-user workstation, and keystrokes and mouse clicks are returned to the server. In addition just like a human user, CitraTest RPA does not need to ‘see’ an image in the same location each time. CitraTest RPA looks at the entire desktop and when an image needs to be clicked, it will move the mouse to the desired image and issue the appropriate mouse action. CitraTest RPA also automates keystrokes in the same way that an actual user types. The simplicity of using these three elements (visualization, keyboard and mouse) gives CitraTest RPA the power and flexibility to operate with any application or workflow so you can easily automate all your repeatable processes.

Delivering some basic AI functionality
Tevron’s powerful image and optical character recognition technology can even intelligently account for changes in image display location as well as variations in color. Since Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability to mimic human mental capabilities like cognition, reasoning or problem-solving (versus RPA or the ability to mimic user actions), one can certainly argue that CitraTest RPA delivers some basic AI functionality to help bots cope better with changes. Regardless of your industry and vertical, RPA is here to stay. Did you know that some estimates claim that robots may replace 800 million workers by 2030? Robots have already replaced humans in 25 percent of China’s ammunition factories. Let’s face it – who wants to be working on a DB roll-out with thousands of records to manually move, when you can use a bot?

Get ahead of the curve. Start your RPA journey now! Put your bots to work for you taking care of mundane, boring and repetitive tasks so you can focus on what matters most.

Learn more about CitraTest RPA: https://tevron.com/robotic-process-automation-citratest-rpa.aspx

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End-to-end application monitoring / measuring SLAs for Citrix

Posted on December 23, 2017 by info@tevron.com

You rely on Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop to deliver secure virtual apps or full virtual desktops from any cloud—public (Azure, Google, AWS and now from Oracle Cloud Marketplace), on premises, or hybrid. You may be tackling key IT initiatives, such as application layering for workspace mobility, Windows 10 migration, Skype virtualization (3 out of 4 Citrix users have selected Skype for Business ) or centrally hosting 3D apps and data using HDX 3D Pro.

Ultimately, your success will be measured by user satisfaction with their experiences across devices (speed, relevance, look and feel, consistency …). For example Citrix XenDesktop, administrators can centrally manage their master images while providing users with a customized and personalized desktop experience, yet speed and performance is the # 1 user demand. How many times have you heard that Citrix applications or desktops are “slow”?

Figure 1: Multiple potential points of failure end-to-end

Troubleshooting Citrix problems and slowdowns is complex and time-consuming, because there are many potential points of failure end-to-end: the network, hardware, the virtualization layer, the cloud provider, the application and so on. Plus, lack of integration across monitoring consoles hinders troubleshooting and increases MTTR, which is too costly for your organization. Over 81% of firms say that 1 hour of downtime costs $300k on average (lost revenue and lost productivity), while hourly downtime tops $1M for 33% of large enterprises.
Wouldn’t it be nice to prevent problems before they occur and your call center is overflowing with complaints and escalations? You can identify and proactively resolve problems earlier by adding Citrix SLA monitoring from a user perspective to your IT monitoring strategy! Learn more about Tevron CitraTest APM.

CitraTest APM continually executes end-to-end transactions, simulating real end-users, taking response time measurements along the way. By automating the driving of any Citrix application or desktop just like a real user, visually examining the desktop and responding to changes and driving the keyboard and mouse, CitraTest APM can validate whether all critical aspects of your Citrix environment are available and working within limits, alerting you at the first sign of trouble. Screenshots are also taken on errors to help you analyze problem root cause. Any user transaction can be simulated and measured in absolute values, percentages or statistical deviations to help you identify problems early on, before your users are impacted. Plus, with custom reports (by application, by transaction step, by SLA violations, etc.,) and automatic email distribution you can easily share the information needed for better business decisions (Citrix capacity planning, cloud providers SLAs, datacenter consolidation, etc.)

Are you ready to boost quality and user satisfaction?

Start testing and monitoring your Citrix environment, without any code changes or performance impact. Absolutely no elements of CitraTest APM are installed on any application or database servers, so you get 100% non-intrusive monitoring that will not impact your production operations. All you need is access from Windows to any target application (Citrix, Salesforce, SAP, Epic, Cerner, Terminal-based, legacy applications, Java, .NET, etc.). See who else is relying on Tevron CitraTest APM to deliver optimal user experiences https://www.tevron.com/company.aspx
Good luck with your Citrix endeavors!

Automated testing, monitoring and load testing for EPIC

Posted on April 20, 2017 by info@tevron.com

Getting ready for an Epic implementation or an upgrade? From facilitating physician access to a patient chart or lab results, data mining for clinical research, integrated claim processing or patient engagement, the benefits that an EHR system like Epic will provide to your organization are many. Yet it is one of the biggest and most complex projects you will ever embark on as a healthcare IT professional. For example, a recent $55million Epic implementation at MidMichigan Health required 160 MidMichigan and Epic staffers working around the clock for over a year. Therefore, considering project complexity, cost and length you should be primarily concerned about on-time and under-budget completion as the primary metrics for implementation success, right? Wrong!

While on time delivery, stability and uptime should be critical considerations, your success will be ultimately measured by adoption and user satisfaction. However, there is plenty of room for IT improvement in this front. Consider that only 34% of doctors were satisfied with their EHR systems in 2014 (American Academy of Family Physicians), and doctors and nurses across the board continue to demand an extreme EHR makeover. Want to avoid chaos and frustration and boost user satisfaction? Plan, test, load test and monitor your EHR systems from a user perspective, for all your users, for all roles. Here are some quick pointers to help you get started.

1) Plan– Take the time to properly define record fields to ensure consistency across all facilities, and discuss common workflows and flows with your users (doctors, nurses, financial personnel, administrative staff, patients…). What functions are used most widely? What is the most frequently accessed information?

2) Map and optimize business processes- Your users want to spend less time interacting with the software and more time elsewhere. Therefore, map and document all user requirements and functions, for each group of users. Could you reduce the number of clicks? Could you improve searching? What is a user more likely to want to do next? What are must-have customizations? Consider how to optimize common workflows into new workflow models.

3) Test, test and re-test again (automate your testing!) All functions and critical end-to-end business processes should be thoroughly tested and validated. Begin functional testing as early as possible, so users can provide feedback on common processes and validate reporting structures. Focus on performance testing as well to oversee application response time, a common end-user frustration pain point. As your implementation progresses, automate your testing to save time and easily verify updates, and thoroughly test and re-test as needed to ensure top quality and performance. Look for a test automation solution where you can easily replicate and automate complete end-to-end user interactions with Epic in the form of testing scripts (e.g. logging , search for a patient record, access latest lab results, add visit information ), which can be later on re-used for load testing and monitoring as well.

4) Load Test. As more users place additional demand on your Epic system, performance could slow down and even bring operations to a halt. Ensure readiness for traffic spikes and demand fluctuations with load testing so you can verify that all critical functions and workflows will work well under peak conditions. Build comprehensive test plans that include realistic scenarios with various load levels and ramp up times, and multiple users concurrently performing different actions. In addition, since Citrix is a trusted solution provider to more than 90% of the largest healthcare organizations make sure that you will be able to replicate and measure REAL user activity using the ACTUAL client connection GUI for each load test. That way the most important metric is measured and analyzed – the end-to-end client side response time, so you can verify that SLAs will be met for all pre-defined levels of load.

5) Proactively monitor your Epic system. Simulate and measure availability and response time for all critical Epic business processes you have documented and tested on a 24x7x365 basis, taking response time measurements end-to-end and for each step. Ideally you should reuse testing scripts for proactive SLA monitoring, so you get alerted at the first sign of trouble, when Epic starts to slow down, before your users are impacted.

6) Continue to listen to your users. Stay aligned with your users’ needs and look for ways to continuously boost user satisfaction. Consider re-defining workflows, planning additional customizations, allocating more hardware resources or organizing more Epic training, and keep all lines of communication with users open by hosting regular meetings. Additionally stay on top of key industry trends (e.g. shortcut key strokes could prove deadly with health records and Epic warns providers who use copy and paste) and periodically review testing and monitoring reports to identify the need for Epic performance optimization.

Want to learn more? Check out CitraTest (test automation) CitraTest VU (load testing) and CitraTest APM (proactive response time monitoring from a user perspective).

Good luck with your Epic implementation!

End-to-End Monitoring for Cloud environments (XenApp / XenDesktop / RDS)

Posted on February 22, 2017 by info@tevron.com

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?

Cloud Monitoring

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

SLA Monitoring tips for IT Pros

Posted on July 6, 2015 by info@tevron.com

Whether you like it or not, user experience rules!

In fact, your end users have the ultimate say on whether they are satisfied with the speed, availability and performance of your applications. So a traditional infrastructure-monitoring approach is no longer enough for IT. Moreover, the only way to ensure business success is to build an IT strategy centered on SLA Monitoring from an end-user perspective, so check out these tips:

1) Define your SLA monitoring plans cross-functionally. Building a killer SLA monitoring strategy requires cross-functional collaboration, proper planning and a dose of diplomacy to ensure alignement. For example, are you changing infrastructure providers or moving to the cloud? Are you rolling out some new applications in the future? Are you updating your Website or embedding new third-party components like Web tracking analytics or Social Media widgets? Get all stakeholders together (Development, QA, IT, business owners and marketing teams) to get buy-in and consensus on your SLA monitoring plans at a high level from the get-go.

2) Monitor your SLAs from a user perspective. Your applications fuel your business, so they must consistently perform well, and ultra-fast. Continuously monitor end-to-end transactions from a user perspective, proactively taking response time measurements to ensure user SLAs are met. Check out CitraTest APM! 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, waiting for the next step and measuring response time– CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of your applications are available and working effectively, alerting you in real-time at the first sign of trouble – before your users complain.

3) Monitor critical transactions first. Take the time to map out critical end-to-end flows in your applications. For example: New application code, marketing registration forms, shopping carts, Salesforce record retrieval, key HR functions – they should all be monitored. Focus first on those transactions that drive revenue and fuel your business operations and start monitoring them on a 24x7x365 basis to ensure they are performing top-notch.

4) Oversee SLA response time historically and in real-time. Build comprehensive monitoring scenarios with custom grouping based on physical locations (Headquarters, NYC, remote offices) or monitoring functionality (Application A- SAP, Application B- Salesforce, Application C- Your Main Website, etc.). Everything should be measured in absolute values, percentages or statistical deviations. For example, SLAs for application load time, login time, a Hadoop transaction execution, how long it takes after a “button” is clicked or until the next window or item appears, and so on. That way, you can understand how each application performs per location, per step or per group, both historically and in real-time, identify underperforming components or problematic trends, and prove that SLAs are being met.

5) Look for drill-down capabilities to simplify triage and troubleshooting. CitraTest APM ‘sees’ exactly what the real user experience is, so every monitoring script is built with simple, easy-to-understand visual references, and are easy to create and maintain. When a monitoring script fails, CitraTest APM will take a screenshot to help you analyze the root cause. You can even click and analyze recent incident grids – up to 150 trace logs and screenshots — or visualize script fail logs in sequence to simplify troubleshooting tasks.

6) Don’t forget your mobile users! Smart devices are not only competing for PCs’ place in your users’ lives, or in the enterprise, – they are replacing the experience. In fact, smartphones and tablets now account for 60% of total Internet time (Source: comScore). And mobile user expectations are on par with, if not higher than, their desktop counterparts. Therefore, just like you monitor SLAs and response time for your desktop users, look for SLA monitoring for both mobile and desktop users. Check out CitraTest Mobile

7) Focus on application quality. Before you even define your SLA monitoring plans, think about testing your applications from a user perspective, and test real end-user experience in pre-production! With CitraTest, you can generate real mouse activity and keyboard strokes and then test, measure and validate the images on the screen — just like a real user — and easily reuse those scripts for ongoing SLA monitoring in production via CitraTest APM.

Are you ready to take your IT and SLA monitoring to the next level?
Check out CitraTest, CitraTest APM and CitraTest Mobile

Good luck with your SLA monitoring!

Monitoring Cloud-based Applications Best Practices

Posted on June 16, 2015 by info@tevron.com

What is your cloud monitoring strategy? After all, a whopping 93% of organizations in 2015 are running applications in the cloud or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service, while 82% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74% in 2014 (Source: RightScale 2015 survey).

As you grow, and join the ranks of these enterprises moving to the cloud, or leveraging cloud-based applications, there is one thing that you should not forget. Regardless of where your applications are hosted, your users will hold IT responsible for their user experience! To ensure smooth operations and user satisfaction, you need to monitor cloud-based applications from a user perspective, just like any other application in your portfolio. Here are some quick tips to jump start your cloud monitoring efforts.

1. Prioritize your cloud-based applications. With an increasing number of employees bypassing IT and going rogue to the cloud, it is the wild, wild, west out there. From accounting, invoicing, HR, CRM, email or collaboration tools, the list of applications your employees rely on is long! Since you can’t monitor it all at once, identify those critical applications that must perform well in order to run your business (e.g. internal applications migrated to the cloud, cloud-based CRM, ERP, EHR systems), and monitor these cloud-based applications first.

2. Identify critical transactions to monitor. Put on your “think from a user perspective hat” and map out common functions used by your power users (those driving the most productivity or revenue). Or better yet, schedule a meeting with business stakeholders to identify critical functionality from their perspective. For example, if you are monitoring a healthcare portal, outline critical transactions to monitor such as:

For a doctor- Opening a patient record, logging recent activity, updating prescription details
For a patient- Logging in, reading a doctor email, searching for care

All of these functions should be proactively monitored on a 24x7x365 basis (check out CitraTest APM!) to identify early problematic trends before your users are impacted. After all, a cloud migration project introduces risks of performance degradation (e.g. noisy cloud neighbors in a multi-tenancy deployment resulting on “stolen CPU”, or processes that are not written to effectively use memory, which could overload the allocated memory in an Amazon EC2 instance).

With CitraTest APM you can continuously execute synthetic transactions, taking response time measurements along the way to quickly identify problematic trends. By automating the driving of ANY application — just like a real user – and visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, typing on a keyboard or on a mobile device or driving the mouse, CitraTest APM ensures that all critical aspects of an application are available and working effectively, alerting you in real-time at the first sign of trouble.

3. Decide polling frequencies and alerting policies. A good rule of thumb is to monitor key transactions more frequently (e.g. being able to send a sales proposal is more critical than reporting on sales pipeline) to identify performance degradation signs earlier, and define who should be alerted in the event of warning/critical threshold violations. With CitraTest APM, you can configure the number of response time violations that will trigger an alert to eliminate false positives, easily schedule monitoring tests or disable alerting on scheduled maintenance periods. You are in control of your monitoring!

4. Define custom reports Since different metrics are important for different stakeholders, take the time to map out role-based reports with custom information for each team (per application, per transaction, per functionality, etc.), and automatically distribute reports on an on-going basis (daily, weekly or monthly basis) to keep everybody informed and aligned.

5. Centralize IT response procedures and workflow. Don’t treat cloud-based application monitoring as a separate beast! After all, you are responsible for user experience for all applications hosted on your datacenter or in the cloud, so you want to add cloud monitoring to your existing IT monitoring framework to increase efficiency. Plus you want to use the same APM monitoring solution for all the applications you own and/or support.

Are you ready to boost performance for your cloud-based applications and find performance problems before your users do?

Check out CitraTest APM and CitraTest Mobile

Good luck with monitoring cloud-based applications!

Test Automation for Citrix, Microsoft Terminal Services or RDS Deployments

Posted on August 23, 2014 by info@tevron.com

Assuring application quality and customer satisfaction is the end goal of every organization. However, achieving it in a Citrix, Microsoft Terminal Services or RDS deployments is a whole different ball game –no underlying objects or controls are delivered to the client, instead an image of the application is delivered to the client UI. Therefore, software testing tools built to “see” Windows objects that require specialized knowledge to understand and a myriad of different techniques to manipulate in tests simply will not work, leaving you in the dark, and leading to underperforming applications and unsatisfied customers.

There’s a better solution, and luckily for you it’s super easy to use. If you are looking to automate functional, regression or performance testing in a MTS, Citrix or RDS environment, you will need a test automation solution designed to rely on advanced intelligent image recognition capabilities – automatically built into every testing script – to simplify testing configuration, and reduce your time and efforts. And this is exactly what CitraTest VU delivers.

Let’s illustrate further with Tevron’s real-world customer stories and ROI from the trenches:

Story 1:
Boost application quality within an RDS-based environment

“Since we stream our customer-facing applications within an RDS-based environment, none of the tools out there would work within our environment, we couldn’t test at all since we couldn’t recognize Window objects, the basis for other test automation solutions.”

The result? “The first time we used CitraTest VU load testing tool we identified that our Silverlight application choked with 100 virtual users (VUs), which was an eye opener for us. We wanted to test with 200 VUs, but we couldn’t finish due to a major memory hog. Now we regularly share all CitraTest VU results with Development, QA managers and business analysts, and we jointly analyze this information to fine tune our applications, change configuration settings, optimize performance and gain peace of mind.”

Story 2:
Test Automation in an Agile world

“Now that we are an Agile-based development tool, development cycles are much shorter, and we have much less time to test. Speed is a must, we need results fast, and we need to be able to quickly tweak our test scripts and react to frequent application functionality changes.”

The result? “CitraTest VU is reliable and easy to use. Scripting is fairly easy, I pretty much learned it on my own, and I was up and building scripts in no-time. Plus I can test other areas while my scripts are running, so application quality is much better. Now we use CitraTest to load test every time we roll out a new application (every 3 to 5 months). We also use it for regression testing, plus we use it for smoke testing every day on our builds. This has saved us considerable time!”

Wouldn’t you want to free up your time to do other essential testing? Who wouldn’t!

Therefore, look for a non-intrusive test automation solution that uses the same elements as a user when interacting with an application (visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and the mouse) and embeds image recognition technology to replicate, test and measure any real world transaction using the actual client interface. That way you can capture and compare screen images to a user-created baseline, the basis of Citrix, Microsoft Terminal Services and RDS deployments, and quickly identify slow components, functional defects and other quality problems that need to be addressed before production release.

Are you ready to learn more? Check out CitraTest (test automation) and CitraTest VU (load testing for Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services environments) from Tevron.

Good luck with your quality endeavors!