“We selected Goliath Technologies because their end-user experience monitoring, troubleshooting and management solution supports Cerner and identifies systems degrading before clinicians are impacted. We do more than 15,000 Cerner application launches per day. This early warning system coupled with enhanced performance data and analysis helps us collaborate with Cerner to resolve issues.”
– Mike Nelson, Sr. Vice President, Strategic Services, Universal Health Services
The Goliath Focus: End-to-End Visibility Requires 3rd Party Tools
While Healthcare IT leaders take great care in choosing the right Electronic Health Records system, some may overlook the critical role that a virtualized desktop delivery infrastructure like Citrix and VMwareHorizon plays in providing access to Cerner and other mission-critical applications. The reality is that an organization’s on-premises desktop delivery infrastructure, and performance requirements for delivery of different applications, may negatively impact end-user experience with Cerner.
Understanding how the performance of the on-premises delivery infrastructure impacts the end-user experience requires powerful, purpose-built tools that allow Health IT to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, and prevent access and performance issues. Without these tools, the true root cause of performance issues cannot be established and corrected. Furthermore, the hospital IT department will not have the performance metrics to have a data-driven conversation with CernerWorks that is collaborative.
For those hospitals that deliver Cerner through a ‘double-hop’ configuration, where users connect to IT through Citrix or VMware and then connect to Cerner’s remote hosted environment, the performance of the underlying Citrix or VMware infrastructure can adversely impact the user experience, which may be incorrectly attributed to a Cerner issue that does not actually exist.
As indicated in the image below, without purpose-built tools, the technically unsophisticated perception is that if there is an issue with Cerner Hosted Applications, then the root cause is Cerner, but the technical reality is much different, and there are many conditions, events, and failure points that could be responsible. Only a tool that can deliver deep and broad metrics across end-user behaviors, the IT delivery infrastructure, and Cerner itself will enable effective troubleshooting and future prevention of clinician performance issues.
Resolving Clinician Experience Issues is Complicated
PERCEPTION:
Cerner Owns All Clinician Complaints
REALITY:
20 Different Vendors Can Impact Clinician Experience
The assumption people have regarding Cerner is that there is a direct connection between themselves, and the Cerner hosted environment. Therefore, user issues should be owned and resolved by Cerner
The reality is that there are over 20 vendors who own IT elements that must work in concert to deliver a good clinician experience. This is a complex issue that requires purpose-built software to resolve it.
CernerWorks & Goliath Technologies: Working Together to Improve End-User Experiences across Cerner Lights On Network®
Cerner Lights On Network® and Goliath Technologies offer a powerful and complimentary feature set that together deliver significant value to our mutual customers. Cerner Lights On Network® is the best technology available to support Cerner and Cerner hospitals with the complex needs and requirements of multiple stakeholders throughout the hospital. It provides a robust, comprehensive set of features that covers many critical areas, including Compliance, Security, Adoption, Configuration Standards, Application Performance, Application Use, Patient Outcomes and much more.
Goliath Technologies compliments Cerner Lights On Network® by focusing on the Citrix/VMware environment on-premises and end-user experience at the hospital locations and its impact on the overall clinician’s experience. The systems engineers specifically use Goliath’s software in hospital IT organizations that support both users accessing Cerner over Citrix and VMware, and other corporate staff at the hospital. Goliath focuses on reducing clinician experience issues on-premises when users are interacting with any Citrix or VMware Horizon delivered applications. Most Cerner hospitals are using Citrix and/or VMware Horizon to deliver access to multiple corporate applications, not just access to Cerner RHO. It is because of this dynamic that Cerner often gets blamed as root cause of the clinician’s performance challenges, even though it’s not Cerner’s fault at all but another element within the delivery infrastructure.
The different roles and users (as shown in the image below) for our products actually present additional value for both Cerner and Cerner hospitals.
- The combined metrics available from both Cerner Lights On Network® and Goliath Technologies allow hospitals to analyze a holistic view of their environments and the metrics to collaborate when resolving end-user experience issues.
- Beyond just the IT delivery infrastructure, Goliath collects metrics around the real-time end-user experience and the many events, conditions and user behavior that can impact performance.
- This holistic view allows hospitals to pinpoint the specific root cause of performance issues – which are likely to actually exist in the on-premises delivery infrastructure, not Cerner itself.
- Goliath’s proactive approach to Citrix performance issues leads to less criticism for Cerner and reduces support calls to CernerWorks.
Goliath Critical Capabilities for Proactive Troubleshooting and Monitoring
Goliath provides the following data and features that are different from the Lights On Network®:
Automated Intelligence Isolates Clinician Performance Issues
Goliath provides the ability to drill down into a single end user’s session and, at a glance, review key analytics around that session performance: logon duration summary, key performance metrics from ICA/HDX or PCoIP/BLAST, VM resources, host resources along with application resource usage data. All of these elements can impact the performance of Cerner and, with this insight, an administrator can quickly drill into a root cause of a Cerner is slow complaint and determine if it is Cerner or something within the Citrix/VMware delivery infrastructure. This quick summary enables an administrator to quickly view correlated performance metrics and rule out what isn’t causing the performance bottleneck and focus on the metrics that appear to indicate root cause.
The image above shows Goliath’s summary for a single session. At-a-glance, administrators can quickly get an overview of a single session’s performance.
- Dependency map offers a quick overview of all components involved in establishing and hosting the selected Citrix/VMware session.
- Quick visual breakdown of all stages of the logon process.
- Key performance metrics enable an administrator to quickly view answers about the performance of a Citrix/VMware session and if slowness is caused by the network or other resources.
- A detailed breakdown of the applicate usage reveals root cause of a performance issue within an end-user’s virtual machine.
Real-Time Logon Duration Drilldown
Goliath can monitor and report on the logon duration from Citrix or VMware Horizon. The real-time Citrix Logon Duration Drilldown breaks down a user’s logon process into each of the stages to help understand what needs to be optimized to improve logon times. This report can also be used to identify and troubleshoot session load problems by identifying what may be getting stuck or taking too long to process. Threshold-based alerting on user logon times is also possible.
The image above shows the combination of in-depth Citrix data along with Windows OS logging data to break down the user’s login from start to finish giving the administrator usable metrics to reduce troubleshooting times.
- The logon duration view above not only details out the performance of each logon stage, but also highlights the unique value delivered by Goliath which combines the logon duration metrics with information included in the Goliath logs. This approach saves time and testing because it calls out specific details during login that an administrator would normally have to dig through logs to obtain.
Automated Logons Confirm Cerner Availability
Goliath is the industry’s only proactive, production-ready end-user experience software that validates the availability of the entire Citrix or VMware delivery infrastructure. It intelligently ensures availability by executing real sessions that exercise the exact same steps a user takes during the Citrix/VMware logon process. Regardless of whether a user is remote or local, Goliath gives administrators an “early warning system” that allows them to know exactly what the Citrix end-user experience will be like for their users – in advance.
When there is a logon failure, an administrator will be alerted immediately. Using the simulation details, an administrator can quickly pinpoint where the failure occurred and the root cause.
The image shows how an administrator can quickly drill down to investigate failures right from the application availability dashboard by clicking on the magnifying glass. In just three steps, you can then see where the logon issues occurred during the logon process and what the issue was:
- Highlight of where the issue occurred during logon.
- Visual proof that an issue did occur.
- Isolation of the failure point in the specific details captured.
Automatic Citrix Discovery and Dependency Map
The Automatic Citrix Discovery and Dependency Map intelligently creates a dependency map of your entire Citrix infrastructure with true end-to-end visibility of the health of your Citrix infrastructure. The underlying out-of-the-box imbedded intelligence which drives the color-coded NOC view are hundreds of monitoring rules which proactively look for events, conditions and failure points within the entire delivery infrastructure from the user end point to Cerner RHO.
The image above shows the Citrix Automatic Discovery Map and Highlights critical components:
- Automatic mapping of your entire Citrix infrastructure to visualize connections, relationships, and health of components.
- Ability to easily switch views to different data centers or locations.
- Correlation of end-user experience issues to delivery infrastructure components and health.
- Context-sensitive metrics and alerts for selected components.
Goliath for health systems using Cerner is purpose-built to proactively anticipate, troubleshoot, and prevent issues with the entire on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure used to deliver mission-critical applications including Cerner. Goliath Technologies’ troubleshooting capabilities, combined with Cerner’s remote hosting technologies and services, provides healthcare organizations with advanced warning of potential end-user experience issues and objective technical evidence of root cause to prevent future issues. This results in faster detection, identification, and resolution of these issues before users or patients are impacted.
For more information on how Goliath can resolve end-user experience issues for any Citrix or VMware-delivered application, or to request a demonstration or free trial, please contact Goliath Technologies at techinfo@goliathtechnologies.com.
About Goliath Technologies: Goliath Technologies offers IT professionals monitoring and troubleshooting software with embedded intelligence and automation that is purpose-built to help IT proactively anticipate, troubleshoot and prevent end-user experience issues – regardless of where IT workloads or users are located. By doing so, Goliath helps IT break out of reactive mode, into proactive mode. Joint Cerner and Goliath customers include Universal Health Services, CommonSpirit, Ascension, AtlantiCare, Intermountain Healthcare, Olmsted Medical Center, NorthBay Healthcare, Inspira Health, Children’s National and more. Learn more about how we empower proactive IT at goliathtechnologies.com.
