This is a guest blog post by Babak Roushanaee, Director of Enterprise Strategy at NETSCOUT and editor of ONUG’s Observability working group.

IT admins can manage and monitor Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops through native tools like Citrix Studio, Citrix Director, and HDX Insights, but other, complementary tools are available. As a Citrix Ready-validated application performance and visibility solution provider, NETSCOUT offers products that complement the Citrix management portfolio.

But why look beyond the native tools?

In this blog post, I’ll answer that question by examining challenges associated with delivering a satisfactory Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop infrastructure solution; factors that adversely impact the service; and the value of augmenting native management tools with NETSCOUT’s wire data solution. And I encourage you to register for our November 5 webinar, where you can learn more about leveraging NETSCOUT and Citrix to deliver a best-in-class VDI user experience.

Augment Your Toolset with NETSCOUT’s Wire Data Solution

The image below shows a typical Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment. Beyond the Citrix infrastructure components, it consists of compute and storage resources, external service enablers such as DNS and LDAP, the network, user computers, the client software, and the mobile data service or remote location Wi-Fi.

When a user attempts to establish a remote desktop, a series of interactions is triggered between the Citrix Workspace App, DNS, Citrix Gateway, LDAP, StoreFront, Delivery Controller, Domain Controller, License Server, Configuration Database, Server and Desktop VDAs, and other compute and storage to grant the user access to virtual apps or desktops. Behind the one-click login, there’s an array of technology whose management extends well beyond your Citrix admins.

Let’s look at four reasons they should leverage wire data visibility, available through NETSCOUT, to augment their toolset.

Triaging the Big Picture

Virtual app and desktop solutions, like other software solutions, rely on infrastructure and services spanning multiple IT silos. Troubleshooting issues across these silos is challenging and costs time and money.

The Citrix Ready-validated nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform, power by NETSCOUT’s patented Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) wire data, passively listens to the communication between all tiers of the solutions to automatically discover and map the entire Citrix environment. ASI also tracks and makes available key metrics for each tier by user for faster holistic triage.

Network Latency

The virtual desktop user experience is constrained by a limited latency budget. At a 100-millisecond response time, the human brain subconsciously slows down typing. At 150 milliseconds, users experience noticeable keyboard and mouse lag. While there are multiple sources of latency in the virtual desktop user experience, such as server time, client time, and rendering time, the most significant factor by far is round trip network time.

Network time is, of course, a function of distance, connection speed, and the number of hops. NETSCOUT’s wire data solution tracks both VDI session response time and network time for side-by-side comparison.

Susceptibility to Compute Shortfall

The virtual desktop user experience is notoriously susceptible to compute resources contention in both the client and the server. The intermittent manifestation of the computing shortfall is incredibly difficult to troubleshoot.

NETSCOUT’s ASI technology not only tracks server and client times (along with network and VDI), but also keeps track of signaling embedded in networking protocols that indicate server or client resource exhaustion. This data is valuable to the capacity planner coping with our new normal.

Unintended Consequences of Change

Because Citrix Virtual Desktop users are managed through policies and profiles, changes can introduce errors and unintended consequences. Another area where changes could inadvertently impact performance is network configuration (e.g., priority of service settings). NETSCOUT’s technology provides visibility across the entire service chain, allowing admins to verify as-is configurations versus as-intended to address pesky problems resulting from change and configuration drift.

Learn More at Our Webinar

Citrix admins are tasked with delivering a service spanning multiple IT silos. Augmenting native tools can help to clear roadblocks to visibility between the silos. NETSCOUT’s wire data solution complements Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops by discovering, mapping, and tracking key metrics across all technology tiers to shorten triage and help pinpoint the cause of the irritating performance problems VDI administrators deal with daily.

During our November 5 webinar, you can learn more about leveraging NETSCOUT and Citrix and how, together, we can deliver a best-in-class VDI user experience. Register today!

Leverage NETSCOUT and Citrix for delivering best-in-class VDI user experience
Date: Thursday, November 5
Time: 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. ET
Register Now