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| Oct 2, 2006 -
In May, Citrix acquired Reflectent - this article gives a short heads up on Citrix's up and coming monitoring solution and the competition it faces. In May Citrix announced they had purchased Reflectent - acquiring technology and expertise to broaden their product portfolio to include a view of performance and availability as experienced by the end-user. Developers are now busy working on the application essentially the initial release will brand it and integrating it with the license a server and marketing are pushing the concept of end-point monitoring. Early adopter schemes should be available sometime soon. While sitting in on round tables I keep thinking - will EdgeSight be flop or fillip to Citrix? At the moment, Citrix Enterprise Admins have two tools at their disposal to help them manage their environment. With Resource Manager (RM) you can monitor server stats, alert on thresholds and produce some fairly basic reports on usage and do a little bit of trend analysis. The little used Network Manager allows integration of a Citrix environment into enterprise management tools such as UniCenter or HP OpenView. Network Manager is out of date - personally I've come across issues with it not integrating correctly with the newer releases of the environments its meant to integrate with. I don't know of many sites that actively use the tool. As an item to justify the additional cost of Enterprise server per user I fail to see what value this component actually adds for the majority of buyers. Resource Manager's focus is to tell you the status of your Citrix Servers at a point in time for raw resource usage and availability. You can know, for instance, that your servers are running at 75% CPU utilisation - or that a server is (or isn't) available. But, what does that mean for your users? Is that good performance from their point of view? Its not unusual for a set of server statistics to appear 'healthy' - but in actual fact the user's experience of application performance to be unreliable, or poor. And research shows that in most cases - they won't tell you directly, they won't call the help-desk - they will suffer in silence until it gets really bad; by which time its too late. In addition, reporting using RM is cumbersome - single view reports of each server, a fixed set of reports. This has led to third parties, such as XTS Inc's ATM for Presentation Server (http://www.xtsinc.com/), generating tools to allow improved customisation of reports and so, hopefully, better analysis. A problem for administrators when providing Citrix services is to be able to know when your user's application performance is poor. You'd like to be able to report and analyse the information across the entire farm not simply individual servers. Ideally, you don’t just want to look at server stats - but also to incorporate analysis of performance to and from the edge devices: to monitor the performance from the device connecting to the Citrix server via ICA, then from the applications on the Citrix server to the back end device. You'd then have a better view of the application's environment. You could determine if an application slows due to poor latency from the client to the Citrix server, or because, say, the Citrix server is running fine - but the backend database server is having a really bad day. To this end, Edgesite is in an excellent position – potentially of far more use than Resource Manager. It includes the ability to review end user usage which will be a boon; if only remove Citrix from blame when applications start to slow down. You can also use edgesite to provide detailed information on application and server crash analysis - allowing you to better understand application failures, and be able to relate the failure of an individual application - was it a lack of resources, or a failed update for instance? The current end client is only available for win32, and there is a limit on number of devices an Edgesite server can handle (although that is 5000) - but the reporting and depth of analysis will give far more insight into application usage and performance than RM could hope to give. But, a few factors stand out. Firstly - and I think this is important - its a separate product. EdgeSite will not incorporated as an addition to the Enterprise edition, nor is there a hint that there be a reduction in license costs for EdgeSite for those investing in 'E'. I believe enterprise customers are going to be short changed: I think the acquisition of Reflectent shows that Citrix knows its lacking in the resource monitoring/reporting space. The functionality of Edgesite shows just how lacking RM is. Secondly, Edgesite is a Citrix services focused product - the current and imminent releases don't monitor the rest of the backend. There is no monitoring of your Exchange, SQL, or Oracle servers. This has bemused a number of people who've seen the product and possibly shows EdgeSight as being only half a solution as an organisation would need to obtain an alternative application to monitor other services. EdgeSight is not a unique product - there are a number of offerings available. These include - PremiTech's Performance Guard, eG Innovations Citrix Monitor, and RTO software's Pin Point. Of the alternatives - all can be extended to monitor other servers in your organisation as well as your Citrix environment. egInnovations for instance provides administrators with the ability to create links between servers in their organisation so that an application's performance can be more readily seen. Performance Guard can also be customised to include not only ICA performance, but actual transaction performance within an application. And importantly when I investigated prices for an environment of 50 servers supporting 1500 users, Edgesite would be over £6,000 more expensive to license than its nearest competitor. End point management is an important technology - utilising it allows you to move from a help desk centred approach, where you wait for the disaster to happen to, be a more proactive in monitoring and maintaining environment. Moving into this area is obviously a sensible move by Citrix - it ensures they are delivering on helping deliver remote applications effectively. But, from early indications - the licensing, the focus on monitoring only up to the Citrix server and the higher cost in relation to alternatives suggest that it’s going to be tough for them to make this product stand out. If Citrix are not more careful, the new emphasis on end point reporting that their marketing machine will highlight will bring other products that do the same job, in some instances more completely, and in all more cheaply to the fore. Published at http://www.citrixthings.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=121&Itemid=9 |
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