{"id":14133,"date":"2021-03-05T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=14133"},"modified":"2025-05-14T10:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T14:21:07","slug":"digital-workspace-monitoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/digital-workspace-monitoring\/","title":{"rendered":"The Digital Workspace Monitoring Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span>The Path from Citrix to VMware to Cloud to Containers and more<\/span><\/h2>\n

One of the best parts of our job is enabling you to become the best #ITPerformanceHero that you can be. But behind the scenes, eG Innovations is filled with talented team members who wear their own IT Hero capes. We want to take some time to introduce you to a few of them, who make eG Innovations the leading performance monitoring company in the market. <\/em>We\u2019re pleased to introduce Babu Sundaram<\/a>, Head of Product Engineering at eG Innovations and key architect of our digital workspace monitoring products.<\/p>\n

<\/span>1. Tell us a bit about yourself.<\/span><\/h3>\n
\"Babu
Babu Sundaram – Head of Product Engineering,
\neG Innovations<\/em><\/center><\/div>\n

I am Babu Sundaram and I am the Head of the Product Engineering at eG Innovations. I have a Master\u2019s in Computer Science and am PMP certified. I have spent 18+ years in the software industry playing various roles: from a developer to an architect to a product manager. My expertise is primarily on Microsoft Windows technologies.<\/p>\n

<\/span>2. How long have been you been with eG Innovations and what areas do you focus on?<\/span><\/h3>\n

I joined eG Innovations in 2001 when the company was an infant. I helped architect the company\u2019s Universal Monitor technology<\/a> at first. Then, I helped develop our product for Citrix performance monitoring<\/a>. Later, virtualization technologies<\/a> came up and I and my team added support for these technologies. Over the last 5 years, I\u2019ve focused on cloud technologies<\/a> and containerized environments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/span>3. Monitoring of Citrix environments is something eG Innovations is known for. How did that technology come about?<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Citrix<\/a>We started with Citrix technologies<\/a> in 2003. I remember we did a few demos for our prospects and multiple times, we were told \u201cWhat you are doing is nice, but can you support Citrix?\u201d.<\/p>\n

At that time, we had no idea of Citrix technologies. We started by installing Citrix in our lab, studying what this technology was about, and learnt the use cases, limitations, failure modes, etc., from our own experiences as well as by joining different online forums.<\/p>\n

At that time, Citrix had one product \u2013 Citrix MetaFrame XP! We demonstrated what we built to a few Citrix partners and got their feedback and that started our journey with Citrix technologies. The first few prospect engagements we worked on were very educational. I remember we even closed a deal within a week of getting a lead from our website. That was very exciting!<\/p>\n

<\/span>4. How has Citrix technologies changed over the years and how has the eG Enterprise suite evolved as a result?<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Citrix<\/a>There\u2019s been a dramatic change in Citrix products and architecture over the years. From having a single product, Citrix now has a broad portfolio of solutions. To provide secure access, there\u2019s Citrix ADC (NetScaler)<\/a>, web access is enabled by Citrix StoreFront<\/a>, there are virtual app servers where the client applications are hosted, applications can be streamed from a Citrix Provisioning Server (PVS)<\/a>. There are other supporting technologies like AppDisk, Workspace Environment Management, and so on. So, there are many tiers involved in supporting Citrix access today.<\/p>\n

Each of these tiers can also be virtualized. This adds some complications from an operations standpoint. When there is a problem, you have to be able to say whether the issue occurred in the Citrix stack or whether it was due to the underlying infrastructure \u2013 the virtualization technology (VMware<\/a>, MS Hyper-V, Citrix hypervisor<\/a>, etc.). You can also host these tiers in the cloud \u2013 in which case, you have to make sure that you are not constrained by the sizing of the instances you have obtained from your cloud provider.<\/p>\n

Then, Citrix\u2019s architecture changed in the last three years. There is a separate brokering tier now. And the brokering can be implemented on-premises or on the cloud (Citrix Cloud services<\/a>). From a monitoring standpoint, these changes have meant that our products have had to evolve significantly. We\u2019ve had to build monitoring technologies specific to each Citrix tier and be able to understand the inter-dependencies between these tiers.<\/p>\n

<\/span>5. Have customer expectations around Citrix monitoring changed over the years?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Yes, absolutely. When we first started, the focus was on resource management. In fact, at that time, Citrix had a monitoring product called \u201cCitrix Resource Manager\u201d. The emphasis was all about knowing resources used and sessions in progress.<\/p>\n

Today, the emphasis is on user experience. Everyone recognizes that the success of a Citrix deployment depends on how good the user experience is. We\u2019ve seen projects where customers have tried Citrix technologies and moved back to using physical desktops because they could not get the necessary user experience.<\/p>\n

\"User<\/a>Our solutions have also adapted to these changing trends. A lot of the new capabilities we\u2019ve added over the years have focused on different aspects of user experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unlike web technologies where page download time is the primary measure of user experience, with Citrix technologies, there is no single measure. When you login to StoreFront, you are concerned about logon time and whether you can see your desktop on the user interface. When you click on the desktop and initiate your session, you are concerned about session establishment time. After you have logged into your desktop, if you click on an application like Microsoft Outlook, how long does it take to launch and get to a point where you can check your emails? And finally, when you are typing email, how long does it take for your keystrokes to show up. We\u2019ve built capabilities in our product suite to measure all aspects of Citrix user experience.<\/p>\n

<\/span>6. How have you kept yourself abreast of all the technology changes over the years?<\/span><\/h3>\n

To create a good product, one has to be an expert at the technology he\/she is focused on. We\u2019ve deployed Citrix technologies in our company and used it for remote access. We have geographically distributed teams. I am based in Singapore and many of the developers I work with are in India. To connect between our offices, we use Citrix virtual apps and desktops<\/a>. By being users of these technologies, we end up seeing many of the problems and challenges that our customers face. This makes it possible for us to conceive of and create solutions that are of practical relevance to customers.<\/p>\n

<\/span>7. You\u2019ve spoken about technology changes. Have customer\u2019s expectations from your product changed over the years?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Yes, customer expectations have also changed over the years.<\/p>\n

When we first started with Citrix, there were very few alternatives for Citrix monitoring. Lakeside Software and us\u2026 We were the only players other than the built-in Citrix tools. The bigger monitoring vendors didn\u2019t really understand the unique requirements of Citrix administrators, and they probably didn\u2019t see this as a big enough market. At that time, our focus was to make sure we had the right metrics to detect and alert administrators about problems.<\/p>\n

\"Digital<\/a>Over the years, customer expectations from Citrix monitoring have changed. Different types of dashboards and visualizations is one way in which we differentiate our product from others. For example, with our tool, you can see a geographic map showing where users are connecting to your Citrix site from and what experience they are seeing. This allows a Citrix admin to quickly see if specific geographies are having a problem. Another example is capacity planning. Especially in the last year, many admins have been asked \u201cHow many more users can you accommodate in your Citrix infrastructure?\u201d. Our capacity planning reports help greatly in this area. Another area where we\u2019ve seen more customer interest in is automation \u2013 how can the tool do the basic tasks automatically, so that it doesn\u2019t require human intervention.<\/p>\n

<\/span>8. We see several technologies in the market today that are similar to Citrix. Have you looked at these technologies as well?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Yes. Our product suite supports most of the popular digital workspace technologies \u2013 we have support for Omnissa Horizon<\/a>, Microsoft RDS<\/a>, Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktops (WVD)<\/a>, Amazon WorkSpaces<\/a>, Amazon AppStream 2.0<\/a>, etc.<\/p>\n

<\/span>9. Does eG Innovations provide similar capabilities across all these different digital workspace technologies?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Yes. Most of these technologies are very similar \u2013 although they have different technology tiers, use different protocols, etc. We have tried to apply our learnings from Citrix technologies to the other digital workspace technologies as well. In that sense, we\u2019ve the broadest and deepest coverage for Citrix currently, but the gap between our support for Citrix and other technologies is narrowing with each release.<\/p>\n

The gap also depends on the maturity of the technology. Cloud desktop technologies \u2013 AWS WorkSpaces and Microsoft WVD \u2013 are just emerging and to that extent, our support for these technologies is also evolving.<\/p>\n

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Monitor any digital workspace from one console<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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