It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything and an opportunity came up last week. I was chatting with Citrix CTP Jason Samuel where he suggested that I share more information about the Citrix Analytics on-boarding process. He felt that the Citrix Analytics onboarding process was not just simple, but radically different from what many analytics vendors do today. So, here I am, on a rain-soaked Florida afternoon writing my first blog post on Citrix Analytics. This is the first in a multi-part series on key concepts.

Citrix Analytics on-boarding is turnkey

Before we get to turnkey, let me explain what on-boarding means. On-boarding simply means adding your Citrix product instance to Citrix Analytics. Now, let’s unpack that a little. There are two kinds of Citrix products:

  • On-premises: XenApp and XenDesktop, NetScaler, etc.
  • Citrix Cloud Services: XenApp and XenDesktop Service, Sharefile, XenMobile service, etc.

Note: These names will all be changing soon. Keep an eye out for announcements.

Most Citrix products can be on-boarded in seconds. That’s because Citrix Analytics uses API calls to discover all the products in your Citrix Cloud environment thus saving you the time and effort of installing agents and sensors.

Citrix Analytics does not process customer data without your consent. So, the next step of the onboarding process is turning on data processing. The administrator can turn off data processing at any time.

So what is turnkey you ask? Well, the entire configuration process has been “hyper-simplified” to a point where all the admin needs to do is click a button to initiate data processing.

There Are Some Caveats, Right?

Of course! Who are we kidding? There are two caveats:

  • For on-premises XenApp and XenDesktop sites, you need to configure site aggregation first
  • For on-premises NetScaler, you need Management and Analytics service

On-premises XenApp and XenDesktop

Your on-premises XenApp and XenDesktop sites will show up automatically in Citrix Analytics when you add them to Citrix Workspace. The process of adding adding sites to Workspace is called Site Aggregation. Check out this blog post by my buddy Alex for more details.

That’s just part of the process. You also need to install the Smart Tools agent on your delivery controllers if you want to configure actions. I’ll cover actions in a future blog post. If you already have the agent configured, just make sure your site is added to Workspace and you are good to go.

On-premises NetScaler

Yes, we support your on-premises NetScalers, but you need to add them to your Management and Analytics Service account. Here’s a great post by Jason Samuel on NetScaler MAS.

One more thing: Citrix Analytics only processes data from VPN vservers.

Next Steps

So what are you waiting for? Log on to your Citrix Cloud account and explore the Absolutely FREE Citrix Analytics demo environment. You will not diverted to a marketing campaign, I promise! Check this out.

It’s the end of the post already? Yes, but it doesn’t end here. I plan to post more frequently. Watch this space for release updates, feature deep-dives, demos and other cool stuff. Also, check out this post by my partner in crime, the head of engineering for Citrix Analytics, Ebenezer Schubert.

Until next time, stay analytical!