citrix virtual applications & desktop infrastructure: performance monitoring · 2019-04-15 ·...

[email protected] | 430 Cowper Ave Ste. 250 Palo Alto, CA 94301 | nyansa.com

Citrix Virtual Applications & Desktop Infrastructure: Performance Monitoring

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

SOLUTION OVERVIEWThe Voyance user application performance module for Citrix is the only

comprehensive solution that correlates key performance metrics from

Citrix with data from across the network stack to give IT teams insights

and visibility into the user experience of business-critical applications

hosted on Citrix.

Citrix Application & Desktop virtualization brings with it a unique set of

challenges to organizations that already leverage a complex combination

of infrastructure technologies. Given that most business-critical

applications in regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, are

hosted on Citrix we have built an integration with Citrix to help IT teams

solve the most pressing performance monitoring problems.

Voyance ingests key Citrix performance metrics such as ICA latency,

logon times, server utilization, and detailed failure codes while using

machine-learning to correlate this with data from across the network

stack.

Certified as Citrix Ready, Voyance allows Citrix customers to proactively

manage and improve the experience for their Citrix XenApp and

XenDesktop end users.

KEY BENEFITS EFFECTIVELY MANAGE CITRIX XenApp & XenDesktop USER EXPERIENCE

With advanced integration of Citrix real-time performance data into

Voyance, IT staff can now have detailed visibility into proprietary Citrix

ICA session metrics such as ICA latency, session logon times, application

server resource utilization, as well as when and why machine, application,

and connection failures occur. These real-time metrics collected for every

Citrix user, all XenDesktop and XenApp sessions, are correlated with all

other data sources across the entire network to help IT staff to quickly

find and fix issues impacting the performance of business-critical Citrix-

hosted applications, such as EPIC and Allscripts.

KEY BENEFITS

• Effectively manage Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop user experience performance

• Diagnose performance problems in the network versus application infrastructure

• Track performance of critical Citrix applications

• Use of Citrix recommended Monitor Service API

• Industry benchmarking

• Flexible deployment

ANSWER CRITICAL QUESTIONS:

“How can I distinguish between

Network issue vs Application issue?”

“Are there specific Citrix applications

that are performing poorly?”

“Can I get alerted if the performance of

critical applications hosted on Citrix is

poor?”


PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS IN THE NETWORK VERSUS APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Detailed insights into extremely granular complex questions are provided. For example, “Which

clinician on the corporate SSID is experiencing poor application response due to poor Wireless

coverage on the 3rd floor of building 2?” Any relevant data sources that apply to the root cause of a

particular type of Citrix incident are correlated. This provides for systematic call out or the elimination

of potential root cause.

If a clinician has poor experience using EPIC hosted on Citrix because the application response is

slow, the system automatically correlates relevant symptoms including whether wireless was good or

bad. At the same time, the system determines whether the WAN link was over-utilized or if some other

problem contributed to a poor application experience. This helps eliminate finger-pointing between

various IT teams by identifying the root-cause of performance problems whether they occur in the

application or network infrastructure.

TRACK PERFORMANCE OF CRITICAL CITRIX APPLICATIONS

By default, Voyance monitors performance of all XenApp & XenDesktop sessions. Additionally,

customers can define individual applications that are critical to their business needs and the platform

will automatically identify usage of the application, measure user experience and performance,

automatically baseline performance and alert when there is a deviation from the baseline. The

automatic baselining also allows customers to track and quantify the effect of any client,

infrastructure or application changes to client experience on XenApps & XenDesktops.

CITRIX APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

FIGURE 1: View of all clients (wired & wireless) using Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop or an individual Citrix-hosted application.

FIGURE 2: View of an incident created for a poor performing Citrix Application with detailed root-cause analysis.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2


USE OF CITRIX RECOMMENDED MONITOR SERVICE API

Voyance uses Citrix Monitor Service API to pull the data from a centralized location - Citrix Delivery

Controller. This eliminates the need to poll each individual server, and there could be hundreds of

these if not more, depending on the deployment. The Monitor Service API is highly scalable and uses

the Open Data (OData) protocol, which is a Web protocol for querying and updating data, built upon

Web technologies such as HTTP.

CITRIX PERFORMANCE METRICS OVERVIEW

FIGURE 4: View of Citrix performance metrics - ICA latency, Session logon times, application server resource utilization, application & connection failures

DRILL DOWN

FIGURE 3: Detailed data correlation and root-cause analysis providing visibility into all the contributing factors across the stack and how they are affecting Citrix application performance metrics

FIGURE 3

FIGURE 4


INDUSTRY BENCHMARKING

An ‘objective’ reading on whether customer environments are performing well or not. The same

Citrix user experience measurements and statistics (but no personal user data) within all customer

environments are compared and anonymously shared among all customers. This uniquely allows

customers to see an apples-to-apples comparison between their environment and other similar

environments. What does performance of Citrix-hosted applications look like in an environment with

500 client devices and similar network infrastructure? With cloudsourced industry benchmarks,

customers can quickly see the answer to this and many other questions.

FLEXIBILITY IN DEPLOYMENT

The Voyance platform can be deployed in multiple ways, depending on the customer’s preference.

Voyance Private Cloud is a deployment option wherein the Voyance backend is deployed in a

customer’s own data center and therefore no network related data leaves the customer premises.

The unique aspect of Voyance Private cloud is that enterprises are still able to have the benefits of

the public cloud service — cloudsourcing, feature velocity – within a completely privately operated

environment.

VOYANCEPrivate or Public Cloud Analytics Engine

VOYANCE Crawler

Data Sources Voyance

to Crawler

Wired Fabric

Closet Switch

Access Point

CLOUD

INFRASTRUCTURE

CLIENTSCritical Applications

Trust and Identity

Wi-Fi Controller ARUN / CSCO / EXTR

Cisco ISE, Aruba/HP Clearpass, Free RADIUS, AAA

SPAN, TAP

SPAN

Raw Packet Data

Cisco UCM, MSFT SKYPE, Citrix, GE Unity, ASCOM

NetFlow, JFlow, SFlow

SNMP, AMON, etc.

Data integration directly to Cloud

WAN Routers

Clinical devices/assets WIRED WIRELESS

Small Branch Appliance (300Mbps) Large Enterprise Appliance (Up to 40Gbps) or ESXi Virtual Machine

SIEM, SecOps, CMMS

OUR PLATFORM

FIGURE 6: Voyance provides secure architecture with optional integration for applications such as Splunk and ServiceNow.

BENCHMARKING PERFORMANCE

FIGURE 5: Normalize Citrix application performance and user experience automatically and track over time how users are being impacted by poor Citrix performance.

FIGURE 5

FIGURE 6


Credited with developing the industry’s

first cloud-based enterprise network

analytics platform, Nyansa is a fast-grow-

ing innovator of advanced IT analytics

software technology and operates the

world’s largest and the only vendor-agnos-

tic public analytics service – observing

and analyzing traffic across hundreds of

production sites with more than 20 million

client devices around the world.

The Nyansa Voyance platform is the

industry’s first full-stack vendor agnostic

platform for client experience and criti-

cal asset protection.

Employing context relevant machine

learning and big data analytics, the

Voyance platform collects and analyzes

extensive data including packet and

flow data, wireless metrics, system log

metrics, global threat and IP enrich-

ment data. Nyansa’s Voyance product is

available as a public SaaS service or as a

pre-configured private cloud solution

Customers range across a variety of

industries including companies such as

MuleSoft, Stanford University, Uber, Tesla,

Mission Healthcare System, San Francisco

International Airport, American Eagle

Outfitters, and the Mayo Clinic.

Voyance is available for proof of concept

demonstrations at no cost. The system is

typically deployed and operational in under

one hour.

To request a demo, trial or more informa-

tion, visit: https://www.nyansa.com/demo.

About Nyansa

ADDITIONAL KEY BENEFITS • Real-time Citrix Performance Charts, Citrix

application performance drill down

• Proactive incident generation & root-cause analysis

• Granular RCA - Out of licenses

• Performs at wire speeds and analyzes transactions in real-time to provide timely insights

• Comprehensive analysis as Voyance correlates Citrix performance with activity in the network

• Support for Wired & Wireless Devices - support multi-vendor infrastructures

• Citrix Ready - Certified by Citrix to work with both XenApp and XenDesktop as part of the Citrix Ready certification program

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Data Source: Voyance Crawler will pull Citrix

performance data from Citrix Delivery Controller

via Citrix Monitor Service Open Data (OData) API

Version of OData API supported: Version 4 & 3

Minimum Citrix version supported: Citrix version

7.15 and above

citrix virtual applications & desktop infrastructure: performance monitoring · 2019-04-15 ·...

Documents