Originially posted by Danny van Dam

Help desk technicians form the front line of support in identifying, troubleshooting, and preventing end user performance issues (and costly downtime) for key applications and services. They need to quickly identify the scope of the issue and route the critical details required to fix the issue – fast. Goliath Technologies increases the troubleshooting and remediation abilities of help desk technicians by placing a vast array of tools at their fingertips. This support is available in three key areas:

  • Troubleshooting the specific root-cause of the issues impacting logon duration or session performance based on detailed metrics from both current and historical user sessions.
  • Identifying the scope of the issue: is a reported issue limited to a specific user, or a larger issue impacting multiple users, or even entire user groups or geographies?
  • Preventing calls before they happen by automatically testing system and application availability to identify and resolve issues before end users are impacted.

Once issues are identified, Goliath helps resolve issues quickly with advanced remediation capabilities that alert service professionals to errors and respond with automated ‘self-healing’ actions or identifies the specific root cause for faster repair. This results in reduced calls and support tickets, smoothly running systems, and happier users.

Troubleshoot Individual End User Calls with Goliath Performance Manager

For individual end user calls, Goliath offers a variety of tools with which to troubleshoot issues. From being able to view historical data of past logons, to what network the user is logging in from, to being able to

pinpoint at what step in the logon process the user experienced an issue – the Goliath XenApp/XenDesktop sessions views provide all of this data and more. Some of the available troubleshooting metrics include:

  • Citrix receiver version – Provides more information to troubleshoot in case the client version isn’t up-to-date.
  • Client address and network location – Helps diagnose connection speed issues and confirm client location.
  • Session properties – Delivers all Active Directory details for an end user for troubleshooting – all user and workstation specific.
  • Logon Duration – Pinpoints the specific step in logon where the user experienced an issue, as well as why the issue occurred, so that the ticket can be routed with full informational details.
  • Historical logon data – Provides historical context. If users report an issue has occurred multiple times, historical data is available in the XenApp/XenDesktop Session with a searchable interface to find specific users or time period.  Goliath is the only company to offer a detailed historical view of all of these individual metrics.

Additionally, Goliath offers detailed data down to the granular level on applications running on a user’s workstation, bandwidth use, and task usage to help find the information required to assist your end users as completely and quickly as possible. In many companies, support technicians needed to be dispatched to the end user’s physical location to capture this data from the machine directly.  This is time-consuming, expensive, and the system may no longer be in the error state it was when the issue was reported.  Goliath Performance Monitor captures all this information and delivers it to a central location for rapid analysis.  The results can be easily shared with other teams through enterprise support systems like ServiceNow or Remedy.  This means support technicians can identify issues, and either resolve them or route them confidently to the correct team with all the details required to speed resolution.

Identify the Scope with Goliath Topology View

The Goliath Topology view provides a visual guide to the logical relationships and connections of your entire Citrix infrastructure and shows the health of each individual component at a glance. It provides detailed information on the status of your delivery groups, machine catalogs, images, clusters and hosts that allows you to quickly identify and troubleshoot macro-level events affecting locations, regions, and other large groups of users.  This is critical to Help Desk Technicians because it allows them to quickly understand the scope of the problem.  Events impacting larger groups of users can be immediately identified and the proper support teams can quickly access the necessary details on what groups are impacted and which parts of the delivery infrastructure is involved.  This results in faster resolution and return to normal operations.

Preventing Calls Before They Happen with Goliath Application Availability Monitor

Help Desk and Support teams are always working to reduce end user issues and support tickets.  The best way to do that is by proactively resolving issues before end users are impacted.  The Goliath Application Availability Monitor automatically tests the entire delivery architecture and confirms applications will launch when end users attempt to access

them.  By simulating actual logon and application launches from actual user locations, in the exact same way that a real end user does, the technology allows for advance discovery of issues by validating that the delivery workflow will execute. The key benefit is that when an issue is discovered by a simulated ‘virtual user’, it can be addressed before end users are ever impacted.

The Next Step:
Resolving Issues with Advanced Remediation Capabilities

Once the problem has been specifically identified, Goliath goes beyond monitoring and troubleshooting metrics with unique Advanced Remediation Capabilities that alert services teams to potential errors and speed resolution with automated actions or specific, expert knowledge from other team members.

  • Threshold-Based Alerting allows help desk professionals to receive proactive communications based on faults, error and similar conditions so that issues can be addressed before end users even report the issue.
  • Automated Remediation and Self-Healing delivers automatic remediation fixes when certain alerts are triggered based on faults, events or conditions. Whether it be restarting a service, or running a PowerShell script, Goliath supports “self- healing” workflows to allow IT organizations to dramatically increase Help Desk response times and implement truly proactive IT processes. Available remediation actions include:
    • Citrix:
      • Restart print, application, & Citrix services
      • Start/restart VDA agent
      • Disable logons to XenApp servers
      • Kill stuck print processes
      • Clear temp directories
      • Kill apps with memory/CPU leaks
    • Infrastructure:
      • Restart SQL service
      • Restart backup job
      • Execute Windows job scheduler tasks
      • Reboot servers
  • Alert Resolution Instructions allow team members to share information for cases when automated remediation is not an option. Goliath allows administrators to automatically pass on troubleshooting details to team members when certain alerts are triggered.  This allows your best experts to share their knowledge and allows the correct support team to resolve these events more quickly and consistently.

To See How Goliath Empowers Help Desk Professionals to Proactively Solve End User Problems: