Citrix End-User Experience Monitoring with eG Enterprise

Citrix User Experience – A Key for Business Success

Citrix technology is used to provide remote users with access to key business applications. If Citrix access is not available or slow, users will be less productive and the business will suffer. To ensure Citrix success, administrators need to be sure that the Citrix user experience is always optimal.

There are many facets to the Citrix user experience. Key aspects include: logon time when the user connects to the service, application launch time when the user first accesses an application or a desktop, screen refresh latency when the user performs interactive tasks, and available bandwidth when a user performs actions in the application.

Challenges

Citrix is one of the most performance-sensitive applications in enterprise networks. A performance issue anywhere in the infrastructure can lead to users reporting that Citrix is slow or not working well.

To ensure great user experience, Citrix administrators must be able to monitor all the different aspects of Citrix user experience proactively. And when a user experience issue is detected, they must be able to quickly detect and resolve issues to minimize downtime.

eG Enterprise: All-in-One in One Solution for Citrix User Experience Monitoring

eG Enterprise is a purpose-built Citrix Ready certified solution to monitor, diagnose and report on Citrix user experience. With eG Enterprise, administrators can:

• Simulate Citrix logons to detect times when the Citrix farm is either not available or slow to logon users
• Simulate entire Citrix sessions to detect slowness during application access
• Monitor actual user logon times and diagnose why the logon process is slow
• Track application launch times and report slowness
• Monitor Citrix virtual channels to detect bandwidth or slow response issues

Features

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  Identify Citrix Logon Issues Proactively with Simulated Logon Monitoring

  eG Enterprise Logon Simulator for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, a built-in tool available with eG Enterprise, simulates exactly the exact same steps that users perform when they logon to Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop and captures the time taken for the logon process. Using the results of the simulation, administrators can:

  • Easily identify what affects user logon experience: credential authentication, application enumeration, application launch, etc.
  • Establish baselines and compare user experience across multiple locations

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  Diagnose the Root Cause of Logon Slowness with One Click

  • eG Enterprise monitors in real time the actual logon times seen by each and every user accessing the Citrix farm
  • Logon metrics are tracked from the Citrix Delivery Controller as well as from the Citrix XenApp servers and XenDesktop VMs
  • With just one click, administrators can see why logon is slow: whether it is being caused by GPO processing, logon script execution, profile loading, user authentication, or other factors
  • Additional diagnosis reveals why a user’s profile is large, or which group policies are causing logon slowdowns

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• 

  Proactively Detect Application Slowness with Full Session Emulation

  eG Enterprise records and replays an entire user session, all the way:

  • From logging in to launching an application or desktop (e.g., open the SAP portal)
  • Performing tasks in the application (e.g., access HR information, approve/revoke HR requests, etc.)
  • And then logging out of the application

  Admins can use the recorded script to simulate a full Citrix session—24x7—and report availability and performance at each step of the user interaction and from different locations.

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  Report Launch Times for All Published Applications

  • Track who launched what application and at what time
  • Be alerted when application launch takes too long
  • Determine if slowness is specific to some applications only
  • Compare performance across applications and across servers to identify performance anomalies
  • Correlate application slowness with infrastructure usage and performance, to identify the real cause of slowness

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• 

  Correlate End-User Latency with Network Latency

  Citrix administrators frequently report that slow performance is caused by network connection issues between user terminals and the Citrix farm. Using eG Enterprise, administrators can track

  • The screen refresh latency in real time for every single user session
  • The network latency between the user terminals and the Citrix farm (without any additional instrumentation on the user terminals)

  Comparison of network latency with the screen refresh latency reveals the cause of slowness. For example, if the network latency is high, then an increased screen refresh latency is attributable to network slowness. Using this information, Citrix administrators can easily identify if slow performance is due to the Citrix servers or because of a user’s connection to the Citrix farm.

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• 

  Monitor All the Citrix Virtual Channels

  Monitoring of virtual channel usage for each Citrix session provides great insights into factors that can affect the Citrix user experience. eG Enterprise tracks the line speed at which the user is connecting to the farm, the overall bandwidth usage and details of the bandwidth used on each of the virtual channels. Using this information, administrators can determine if the user is performing any unusual activity that could be causing higher latency (for example, printing a large file in the background, watching a bandwidth-consuming video).

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  Track Session Disconnects

  Abrupt disconnects from the Citrix farm cause users to lose work from their session. When disconnects happen, they also leave behind user processes on the Citrix server/desktop. This results in wasteful usage of resources on the Citrix server/desktop.

  eG Enterprise helps identify unusual session connection losses when they occur. By auto-correlating session performance with other activities on the Citrix servers/desktops, eG Enterprise helps identify the reasons for such disconnects—such as a bad printer driver causing sessions to be disconnected.

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  Reduce Mean Time to Repair and Enhance Service Uptime

  When performance problems happen, if it takes hours or days to resolve the problem, users will be frustrated. To ensure user productivity and satisfaction, Citrix administrators must be able to quickly identify and resolve the cause of performance problems.

  With eG Enterprise, administrators can not only monitor every component of the Citrix Stack (XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, XenServer, StoreFront, NetScaler, Provisioning Services, License Server, etc.) but also the supporting infrastructure tiers (Active Directory, virtualization, storage, network, applications, etc.)—all from a single, intuitive web console.

  • Discover topology maps showing how the Citrix infrastructure is setup and highlight inter-dependencies between the different tiers
  • Correlate Citrix user experience with the performance of each of the supporting tiers and help identify the root cause of a problem
  • Integration with service management tools like ServiceNow, JIRA, and more, to automatically creates trouble tickets

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Benefits of Citrix User Experience Monitoring

• Quantify the performance that users see when they access the Citrix farm
• Monitor all aspects of Citrix user experience—from logon times to application launch times
• Proactively detect times when Citrix users are seeing slowness
• Troubleshoot the cause of slowness in one click using eG Enterprise’s automated root cause diagnosis technology

Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.

• eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
• Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
• Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
• Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
• Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
• Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)