User Experience Dashboard

One of the biggest challenges that Citrix/virtual/terminal desktop administrators have is that they often have to spend time troubleshooting problems that may be caused in other parts of the infrastructure that they do not control. For instance, a slowdown in the home network that a user is connecting from can impact the user experience when accessing a Citrix service. eG Enterprise includes a User Experience Dashboard that makes it possible for end-users themselves to view the performance metrics related to their access to the Citrix/VDI/Terminal server infrastructure. This way, end users can easily determine when they see a slowdown, is the problem being caused by connectivity to the Citrix/VDI/Terminal server infrastructure, by any application(s) that they are using within a Citrix session, or by the Citrix infrastructure itself. If a performance problem is in the interconnecting network or in one of the applications the user has launched, the user can initiate corrective action (e.g., kill the offending process, contact the local network team, etc.) to alleviate the issue.

The self-service capability that the end-user performance dashboard provides results in fewer complaints and trouble calls to the Citrix/virtual desktop helpdesk. As a result, support costs are lower, end-users are less frustrated and the Citrix/virtual desktop deployment can proceed to successful completion.

Citrix/Virtual desktop/Terminal server administrators can also use the same dashboard to handle user complaints. When a specific user calls, they can view the performance dashboard for that user and determine what action needs to be taken to resolve the issue. This industry first end-user performance dashboard for Citrix/virtual desktop/terminal server infrastructures greatly simplifies the day to day operation of a Citrix/virtual desktop infrastructure. To access this dashboard, a Citrix/VDI/Terminal server administrator registered with the eG Enterprise system should first invoke the Monitor menu in the eG monitoring console, browse the Dashboards menu, move the mouse pointer over the User Experience Dashboard group, and pick the vdi or XenApp or Terminal option depending upon which user experience dashboard they want – the one for VDI users? or the one for XenApp users? or the one for the users logged into the terminal servers? (see )

Note:

The vdi, XenApp and Terminal options will be available only if the VDI, XenApp and Microsoft RDS components are managed in the monitored environment. If only one of the three is available – say, if only XenApp servers are managed in the environment -  then, the User Experience Dashboard menu option will not display any sub-options. Instead, clicking on the User Experience Dashboard option will automatically lead administrators to the Overview dashboard of the XenApp environment.

If a SuperManager is engaged in managing the eG managers that are monitoring a slew of virtual components, in a virtual environment, then, each eG manager may contain separate User Experience Dashboards. It may become a tedious process for the egsm user of the SuperManager to login into each of the indiviudal managers to weigh the performance of the users of the virtual environments. Therefore it is essential for the egsm user to view the User Experience Dashboard of all the eG managers from the SuperManager console itself. The User Experience Dashboard option in the monitor interface of the eG SuperManager felicitates this.

An egsm user has the same view as that of the users who are eligible to login to the eG managers managed by the eG SuperManager. Apart from viewing the User Experience Dashboard of individual users logged into the virtual desktops/VMs, the egsm user is also entitled to build the User Experience Dashboard of those individual users.

Note:

• The widgets added by the egsm user in the User Experience Dashboard is visible only to the egsm user in the monitor interface of the eG SuperManager. Individual users who login to the eG SuperManager will not have access to those widgets.
• The User Experience Dashboard viewed by the egsm user is the one with the default settings of the individual eG managers. If any user logging into the eG managers has overridden the default settings to customize his own settings, then, those customizations will not be visible to the eg sm user.