The Organization: Health Care System
The Organization’s Infrastructure: Citrix XenApp 7.16, VMware vSphere, and MEDITECH
The Pain: Clinicians complaining about MEDITECH application performance
A major healthcare organization faced chronic complaints from end users regarding the performance and responsiveness related to clinical and business applications delivered by Citrix XenApp 7.16 including MEDITECH. For example, in the morning, right when physicians began to see patients, there were hundreds of calls to the help desk regarding MEDITECH and Citrix XenApp 7.16 logon failures and Citrix latency or session slowness.
The primary challenge was that there was no Citrix monitoring that would provide visibility into the underlying delivery infrastructure. Without this visibility, it makes effective MEDITECH and Citrix Troubleshooting almost impossible. Additionally, these issues were sporadic, so isolating root cause was like finding a needle in a haystack. This required a historical record of windows event logs that could be indexed, analyzed and filtered to isolate the critical data points in order to correlate the data, find root cause and resolve the issue.
The MEDITECH & Citrix Troubleshooting Solution:
Goliath for Citrix Monitoring of Citrix XenApp 7.16 with the MEDITECH Module delivered the solution that the organization needed. Beyond the basic monitoring components, the Citrix monitoring and Citrix troubleshooting software also has built in functionality for event log management. As soon as the Citrix monitoring and Citrix troubleshooting technology was configured, it began to provide critical visibility that Citrix administrators did not previously have. The information they needed was provided by the Windows Event Log Analysis Report, one of the 66 reports available out-of-the-box with GPM. This windows event log analysis report rolled up the most important failures and faults into a single summary, eliminating non-essential data points, and, thereby, speeding up the manual process of individually checking windows event logs on the servers. The Goliath MEDITECH Module allowed the administrators to pull MEDITECH specific metrics into the reports as well. As a result, Citrix administrators were able to analyze and assess Citrix XenApp 7.16 server-side issues in a matter of minutes, rather than the days or weeks it took before the technology was in place.
By utilizing the windows event log report, the Citrix administrators noticed that each day there were a multitude of application crashes and hangs for their five most business critical applications, two of which were MEDITECH applications. This was particularly concerning because each application crash event represented a time when a user was unable to logon or pull patient data from the system.
The image below depicts the Windows Event Log Analysis Report and how it presents the data.
The windows event log management reports provided great value in pinpointing the root cause of these MEDITECH issues and allowed administrators to work with the application vendors to resolve the existing problems. However, the IT team also recognized that these issues were not likely to be a one-time occurrence as their experience had shown them four things:
- Application crashes related to these five applications were reoccurring over time.
- The root cause and resolution for these issues was consistently the same and could be documented.
- They could permanently fix the issue if addressed early, thus, the issue could be prevented from becoming a widespread issue.
- They could set proactive alerts to make sure that they would get advanced warning in the future based on certain events being triggered.
This windows event log management feature also provided the necessary information required to open a task with MEDITECH to assist MEDITECH support with resolving certain issues that were specifically related to the MEDITECH application.
The Summary:
The Windows Event Log Analysis Report, Citrix Monitoring, Citrix Troubleshooting and the MEDITECH module all proved to be a comprehensive solution that the customer was able to use to easily identify problems in the environment and, subsequently, configure alerts to address the problems in advance of them becoming widespread. In addition, management used the data from the Citrix monitor to more accurately track the health of the environment which enabled the team to effectively communicate how problems were manifesting, resulting in more productive collaboration with application vendors. This combination of reporting and alerting has empowered the health system to become proactive in their strategy to identify and address issues in their Citrix environment.
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