This is a guest blog post by Abdul Khader Jeelani, Lead Marketing Analyst, eG Innovations.
There has been a significant increase in Citrix Cloud services adoption over the past few years. Citrix Cloud ensures easy and secure access to applications and desktops from anywhere at any time, provides at least 99.5 percent uptime, and is backed by a global support team.
Why Performance Monitoring Is Critical
Any enterprise that has deployed a Citrix digital workspace knows the expectations users have for performance. Virtual apps and desktops are expected to perform at least as well as they did when they had dedicated hardware. Users are not concerned about the type of infrastructure used or whether this infrastructure is hosted on-premises or in the cloud. They only care about things like how fast the logon is, what the screen latency is, and how quickly applications launch.
Multiple surveys show that slow applications have a direct impact on user experience, productivity, revenue, and overall ROI, so performance monitoring is often top of mind for any Citrix administrator. When using Citrix Cloud services, performance monitoring becomes even more important. Citrix Cloud provides uptime guarantees but what about response time? This is just one of the many considerations that Citrix admins must have as they consider a migration to Citrix Cloud.
Five Citrix Cloud Performance Monitoring Challenges
Here are five performance monitoring challenges that you must be prepared for when deploying Citrix Cloud services:
Ensuring a Great User Experience
The success of any Citrix digital workspace deployment depends on user experience. You will need to have performance monitoring in place to measure all aspects of user experience. A combination of synthetic and real user monitoring is ideal. Synthetic monitoring runs 24×7 and alerts you to performance issues, even when no real users are accessing the Citrix service. At the same time, tracking the real experience of users is important. After all, that’s how your performance is measured.
Monitoring the Cloud Control Plane
Citrix manages the cloud control plane and handles maintenance and patching of the delivery controllers, license servers, gateways, and more. At the same time, to ensure that users can access the service 24×7, you will always need to keep an eye on the cloud control plane. Some of questions you need to track include:
- Are there any unusual logon activity/failures happening?
- What is the average logon time for users?
- Do you have sufficient licenses to handle the workload?
- What is the latency from your resource plane to the cloud control plane?
Monitoring the Resource Plane
With Citrix Cloud, you are still responsible for the performance of all the resource plane components. These include the virtual app servers, the virtual desktops, the hypervisors supporting these servers and desktops, provisioning servers, profile servers, and any back-end applications accessed through Citrix. Technical glitches in any one of the supporting infrastructures can affect the Citrix service delivery KPIs.
Organizations today can choose to deploy Citrix StoreFront or Citrix ADCs on premises or in the cloud control plane. If deployed on premises, you will need to make sure you are monitoring these key access components, as well.
In the resource plane, Citrix Cloud Connectors are new components that are used to integrate the resource and control planes. Although Cloud Connectors are deployed in a high availability configuration, it is important to monitor their workload and performance because any abnormalities can affect the user experience.
Root Cause Diagnosis in a Multi-Domain Cloud Infrastructure
When the entire service delivery infrastructure is managed by one team and in one realm of control, diagnosing a problem is easier. The multi-domain nature of a Citrix Cloud deployment makes diagnosing problems more challenging. In-depth insights into each service delivery tier, proactive analysis and alerting, and color-coded topology views providing end-to-end visibility are important for early and accurate diagnosis of problems. Visibility must span across both the Citrix and the other tiers of the infrastructure.
Analysis of KPIs for Rightsizing and Optimization
You will often be called upon to provide additional insights into the usage of your Citrix deployment. For security and compliance, you may have to report on who logged in, how long did they remain logged in for, what applications did they accessed, and more. For capacity analysis, you will need to report on how utilized your Citrix servers are and how many more users can be accommodated on each server. For service level analysis, you may need to provide indications of which tiers of the infrastructure are a bottleneck when problems occur. Historical analysis and reporting capability are a must to be able to answer these and other questions you will encounter as you move forward in your Citrix Cloud journey.
Conclusion
Don’t ignore peformance monitoring as you start to deploy Citrix Cloud services. Read this eG Innovations whitepaper for a detailed analysis of Citrix Cloud deployment options, performance challenges, and monitoring solutions. Watch this on-demand webinar by eG Innovations CEO Dr. Srinivas Ramanathan, who discusses whether Citrix Cloud services and performance monitoring.
