A recent survey by eG Innovations and xenappblog found that 68% of organizations are using 2-5 different tools for monitoring and managing their Citrix infrastructure. Multiple monitoring tools make it expensive to operate and troubleshoot IT infrastructure issues. Furthermore, a lot of manual effort is required to diagnose and fix performance issues.
Join Richard Faulkner, Enterprise Solutions Architect and CTP from Conversant Group, and John Worthington, Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations, and learn how you can get a single-pane-of-glass view of your Citrix infrastructure – from the client end to the virtual desktops/apps and even the backend applications.
See how you can:
--Monitor and get proactive alerts on the experience seen by Citrix users
--Track the performance of every layer and every tier of your Citrix infrastructure: NetScalers, StoreFronts, Virtual apps and desktops, WEM, PVS, License servers, etc.
--Troubleshoot in a single click and identify where the root-cause of a problem is: network, or storage, or virtualization, or the Citrix stack?
--Get insights to right-size and optimize your Citrix deployment
6. About Us
We design, build, and manage infrastructure for a
secure, dependable user experience.
Experience KnowledgeTM
• Unlike many in IT, Conversant Group has a unique
perspective: technology is a tool, nothing more.
Technology should support the business, and the
business should support the people.
• Most of our clients have an internal staff that lean on
us to offer support when they need to implement a
difficult technology, solve a complex problem, or
perform daunting, routine, time consuming tasks.
6
7. Our Services
Not all services fit clients' needs equally. Conversant can serve as a client’s infrastructure & security engineering
team, perform specific highly-technical projects, and/or manage specific portions of the infrastructure and security
programs through:
• Assessments
• Security Program Design & Management.
– Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning.
– Incident Response [no retainer].
– Penetration Testing.
– Vulnerability Scanning.
• Full infrastructure support including Tier 1 support.
• Backup monitoring and management.
– Including cloud storage.
• Patching of Windows workstations’ and servers’ OS updates and
3rd party applications.
• Monitoring of servers, firewalls, routers, and switches.
• Server, storage, network, and firewall implementation, support,
and maintenance.
– Including regular patching and configuration
rationalization.
7
8. Why
Conversant?
We are driven and committed to
protecting our clients' data and ensuring
users' applications and data are always
available: it's why we do what we do.
Conversant Group is an extension of our
customers' teams; we are better together.
8
Good afternoon and welcome to our webinar...my name’s John Worthington, I’m the Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations and I’ll be moderating our session today....
Joining me will be Richard Faulkner an Enterprise Solutions Architect at the Conversant Group...welcome Richard...
...before we get started let’s do the usual housekeeping... Please use the GoToWebinar questions panel to send in your questions...we will take questions as we move along our agenda today....
...and of course the webinar is being recorded and all participants will receive a link to the recording in a couple days....
Here’s our agenda...
...first I’d like you to know a little bit about the Conversant Group and eG Innovations...then I’ll frame our demonstration by talking briefly about why it’s critical to monitor Citrix today and what 4 best practices for monitoring Citrix ecosystems are...
...then our demonstration will show you some examples of exactly how eG Enterprise addresses all of these best practices....
..we’ll take some questions along the way and then wrap it up for today...
So, Richard...can you tell us a little bit about the Conversant Group before we begin?
Thanks Richard....let me reciprocate by letting you know a little bit about eG Innovations....
eG Innovations provides enterprise-class performance management solutions that help customers compete in today’s digital world.
...and assuring the digital experience is critical to success today....Forrester suggests that almost all user experience problems relay on several parts of the IT infrastructure...
...and we hear the same thing from Citrix Administrators...not only does Citrix have multiple tiers...for example Director focusing on sessions or NetscalerMAS looking at Netscaler flows....
More than 90% of Citrix Admins like the single pane of glass view that eG provides....for not only all Citrix tiers but the non-Citrix tiers as well....
So, one of things you need to understand about eG Innovations is that we’re not like typical monitoring companies. To start with, we’ve been around for almost two decades and have built the software from the ground up--- we’ve not acquired and integrated other solutions.
The other thing that’s good to know is that the architecture has proven its ability to adapt to changing technologies. From our initial entry monitoring web applications, to Citrix, virtualization, cloud, APM and containers...we’ve always had:
Patented analytics embedded in the monitor that correlates every layer of every component across end-to-end digital business services
Self-learning that adapts data collection in real time to operational events, and self-healing that provides a basis for automated remediation
And a consistent, simple and intuitive user interface.
The product has always been an end-to-end digital performance analytics platform, and helped customers answer the question, ‘Why is my application slow?’
This single pane of glass vision requires broad technology support, and that’s exactly what eG Enterprise delivers.
Ok, thanks for taking the poll...
I suspect that most of the people on this call today understand that Citrix is highly performance sensitive... This is supported by a survey we did some years ago, but is still true today...
The multi-tier nature of Citrix presents challenges for diagnosing performance problems....<click> so when a user complains about slow performance... <click> the performance issue can originate almost anywhere...<click> this makes problem diagnosis challenging...
<keep clicking> Getting domain-specific tools tends to perpetuate a fragmented monitoring environment with multiple consoles to manage....
...this is the multi-console challenge in IT operations.... It’s not just switching between consoles... You need cross-domain intelligence....even with a domain agnostic AIOps solution, without domain expertise cross-domain analytics is usually a form of sophisticated filtering...
...so the single pane of glass vision is directed at many of the typical challenges faced by Citrix Administrators...
<read a few lines>
...with more than a decade of monitoring the performance of some of the largest Citrix deployments in the world, let’s look at some of what eG has learned to be best practice for monitoring Citrix performance....
First, you must monitor all aspects of the user experience...this is where both real and synthetic user monitoring can be effective
Second, you need to monitor every layer of every tier....Citrix and non-Citrix components
Third, you need to leverage analytics to automatically correlate complex performance problems
And Fourth, you need to be able to report and analyze data for capacity planning
Ok, let’s get into the demo and show you what this looks like...
<click> we might want to take a few questions while I’m bringing the demo up....
The virtual apps capacity planning report can help you plan for additional capacity... <click> ...it looks at the average resource consumption and tells you how many more concurrent sessions are possible...
...<click> you can see the current workloads....<click>....and track trends over time ...
...it can also help you predict capacity needs.... <click> see how sessions are load-balanced...<click> ...see which servers can support more user sessions... <click> and get an idea of how many more sessions can be added....
<click> you can find out where the bottlenecks are...<click> and get recommendations on what to do to support more sessions...<click> and it will also tell you how many more you can support after you’ve increased your capacity...
...there’s also a capacity prediction report that can tell you how many more servers you need based on increases in user workloads... <click> just use the slider and see the predictions, which are based on extrapolating historical resource usage patterns...<click> ...and see the increase in resource usage....<click> to find out how many more servers you’ll need..
...there are hundreds of out-of-the-box reports, each of which can be tailored to different organization and user requirements...
...in fact, most customers begin with a few out–of-the-box reports and dashboards and gradually tailor them to different organization and stakeholder needs over time...
...let’s summarize what we’ve see and take a few more questions...
So, while we didn’t have time to show you all the capabilities of eG Enterprise, we did illustrate a few of the ways we help you establish best practices for monitoring your Citrix digital workspace ecosystem...
Today’s digital workspaces are mission-critical...the single pane of glass approach to monitoring your Citrix and related digital workspace dependencies helps drive user satisfaction, increased IT productivity, improved uptime, simplified operations and a greater ability to control costs through optimization...
...feel free to reach out to Conversant or eG Innovations to schedule a deep dive... Ok, let’s take some final questions....