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!