How to Proactively Manage Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop EUE

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Product Review: How to Proactively Manage Citrix XA/XD EUE

New technology provides Citrix Administrators with a proactive view of what the end user will experience during Logon Initiation, Logon Process, and while in their Citrix Session – before the end user.

Philadelphia, PA – March 17, 2015 – Goliath Technologies, the leading provider of Proactive IT Operations software that are engineered to anticipate, troubleshoot, resolve, and prevent performance issues in today’s complex virtual server, virtual desktop, and hybrid cloud infrastructures, announced today the availability of Goliath Performance Monitor 11.5. The latest release offers features for Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop that have never been available in a single product, solving a historically significant pain point for Citrix System Administrators.

“Citrix Systems Administrators want to be proactive in managing Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop environments. The difficulty is getting out in front of potential problems,” said Doug Brown MVP, CTP, vEXPERT and Founder of DABCC.

“With the release of 11.5, Goliath Technologies’ software has the functionality to actually anticipate end user performance issues. I like all the new features but the one that is really game changing for Citrix Administrators is the ability to initiate a Citrix logon process with a simulated user before real users even get to work, and then receive real-time alerts if the simulated user experiences a logon failure, logon slowness or session performance issues. I have never seen a product with this capability in all my years working with Citrix products. This release will create some happy Citrix Administrators.”

Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop Real-Time Data

Until now, Citrix system administrators with responsibility for Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop had no way to anticipate the end-user experience and, therefore, were only able to be reactive to complaints from users. Goliath Performance Monitor 11.5 provides features such as Logon Simulation, Real-Time Logon Duration Analysis, and Real-Time ICA/HDX Channel Drilldown.

Now being truly proactive is achievable because Goliath gives Citrix Administrators the ability to create the same analysis for both real and simulated users by allowing administrators to proactively initiate user sessions with simulated users and analyze performance prior to real end users attempting to access their applications. This capability single-handedly ushers in a new era by providing Citrix Administrators with an unforeseen ability to be truly proactive and will materially improve the end user experience.

“When our Citrix System Administrators field calls from end users, generally the complaints are around logon initiation, the logon process, and session performance”, said Raja Jadeja, VP of Product Management at Goliath Technologies. “We listen intently to our customers and in the 11.5 release of the Goliath Performance Monitor, we have delivered on our commitment to get them ahead of what they commonly term “end user alerts.”

About Goliath Technologies

Goliath Technologies provides proactive systems management software for IT organizations that address the evolving challenges of deploying virtual server and virtual desktop infrastructure whether on-premises or in the cloud. Our solutions are purpose built for these emerging platforms and application delivery methods, so they are vastly easier to use with greater functionality than alternative legacy products or point solutions. We communicate with existing enterprise frameworks, network centric solutions, and other IT management tools so we complement and extend existing IT investments with our virtual server and virtual desktop specific functionality. Goliath’s clients include Xerox, ADP, Wells Fargo, Thomson Reuters, UHS, VA, Wyndham Hotels, Verizon Wireless, Thomson Reuters, Overstock.com, and NASA.

About the Author: 

The team members collaborated to bring together this blog post by calling on their past Customer Experiences and Expert Knowledge of Citrix Troubleshooting. Beyond writing technical documents this team supports Goliath Customers and provides product feature and function guidance to development.

14 Ways to Fix McKesson Paragon & Citrix XenApp Performance Issues

The following is a guest post by Val King, CIO of Valverde Regional Medical Center and the CEO of Whitehat Virtual Technologies.

As a Healthcare IT CIO, one of my responsibilities is to ensure that our medical staff has uninterrupted access to EHR applications in order to provide the very best patient care. This can be a real challenge when you find yourself in a difficult environment with Citrix, McKesson Paragon, HPF and now McKesson Patient Folder (MPF), Webstation, nTier, etc.

In addition to relying on Goliath Technologies’, we employ the following 14 actions to proactively manage McKesson Paragon & McKesson Patient Folder.

1) Get an assessment of the current state of your McKesson and Citrix environment. This assessment does not have to be some super fancy, third-party deliverable, if you have the expertise in house.  From our experience, there are multiple perspectives on each issue and where and what the problems “really” are.

What the actual problems are, what the root cause is, etc. is subject to early diagnosis syndrome (EDS.) EDS occurs when well-meaning staff take the first signs of some success at resolving a problem and circulate that information before it can be vetted.  The “shoot first, test and confirm later” philosophy is a good way to lose credibility with executive management and key staff who want to celebrate wins just as badly as you do.

2) If your support infrastructure for McKesson is not broken, this one will not likely mean as much to you. If there is no process for the way support is handled at your organization, this might help a bit to get you going.

Get a single triage point and assemble a team that can tackle the issues from multiple angles simultaneously.  We divide issues into McKesson Financial, McKesson Clinical, and IT.  We assign specialists to address challenges in their respective category to report problems, offer issue resolution suggestions, and provide updates back to the team.

3) Get a rock solid test environment for McKesson, Citrix and the supporting infrastructure. Keeping this environment up to date will allow clinical staff a place to train, practice, get up to speed, allow changes to be tested, and allow for new versions and upgrades to be vetted before being sprung on the live environment.

4) Don’t touch the job stream. Don’t do it.  If close fails, call McKesson, they will gladly help you.  Use Goliath to setup alerts to notify you in the middle of the night when there is an issue.  Problems here are solved by working through each new issue nightly until you eventually arrive at a stable, reliable close process.

5) Medical Records should not be printing out of Paragon; this can be a patient safety issue for reasons that will be obvious if that is what you are doing today. McKesson HPF is your friend for printing.  Get it setup in Citrix and print away.

6) If the Citrix infrastructure is not working properly, McKesson Paragon will not work properly—period, end of discussion. Typically we see printing issues when our clinical staff move from location to location, but their ability to print to the correct printer does not move with them. We see profile problems; we see slow logins and sluggish response. Goliath Technologies has the best product in the market to enable you to get ahead of these issues and also gives you the data to put fix actions in place to prevent them in the future.

7) Even in a Citrix environment, a full PC with Paragon on it in each major department can come in handy if your Citrix environment is sketchy and subject to frequent downtime. The best answer is to find someone to get Citrix right and redundant.  Plan B would be to use one full-blown PC in key areas to make sure work can continue in an outage situation.

8) If any of the 11 systems that Citrix relies on to deliver your applications or desktops is not healthy, Citrix will at best be limited in delivering the applications and/or desktops to end users. (Active Directory, mass storage, network hardware, hypervisors, Provisioning/machine creation services, etc.) See Goliath Daily Citrix Health Checks.

9) Put a McKesson Super User or other knowledgeable team member with your physicians to see them in action and to teach and address issues that pop-up as they make their rounds daily. Make sure any issues or education needs are brought to the attention of the group via ticket or other method to make sure that hard fought knowledge does not get lost in the shuffle.

10) Create clear lines of communication from the end users reporting issues back to the troubleshooting team. More importantly, acknowledge their requests and follow up with them regularly with status updates, even if nothing has changed, to let them know they have not been forgotten.  A little extra care in (internal) customer service efforts can go a long way in keeping your staff cooperative and doing their best to cover any potential gaps in patient care.

11) Create a knowledge base to capture what you have learned. In our case, we are deploying McKesson specialists in both the financial and clinical areas as well as Citrix experts.  While we create documentation for the environment, the specific steps we have used to resolve issues could very well be lost if the hospital does not have a mechanism to capture exactly what was done and put into a searchable format for future use by the Support Desk.  Get the process in place to capture this information or be prepared to pay someone to do this for you again in the future.

12) Share your wins and the progress that is being made. End users can lose faith or get a bad taste in their mouth from any deployment of Citrix, McKesson or anything that gets off to a shaky start.  They can also be extremely difficult to win back.  As issues are fixed and problems are remediated, share those wins with the appropriate staff so that they can see that progress is being made, that people care, and that they are not just going to have to tolerate a poor end user experience forever.

13) Implement McKesson and all of its modules for performance. The more reactive you are in learning about and resolving these issues, the more you hurt your reputation with your end users, and the more your support costs will vary in overtime and consulting hours to get them fixed.  Put in tools, like Goliath Technologies & SteelCentral Aternity as two examples, that will let you monitor the performance of every key metric of every module in your McKesson software stack.  Our objective is to fine-tune the applications and modules to the point where we will find out about 60% of the issues before the end users do.  Most environments today rely on the end user to notify IT when there is an issue. Statistics from the Aberdeen Group among other industry organizations, state that on average 75% of issues originate with the end user.  We also know that statistically, end users will wait on average eight times before reporting an issue, unless it is catastrophic in nature, but will complain to peers the first time there is a problem.

14) Know when and where to get good help, preferably before a major crisis occurs. Find, acquire, or train great Citrix, McKesson Financial and McKesson Clinical talent. Find the rock stars that can help.  An IT generalist or Server Admin without deep Citrix experience is going to have a harder time getting Citrix right when he/she only sees it a handful of times each year.  Look for consultants and staff that have that deep expertise to augment your team.  Our Citrix guys will see over 100 different Citrix environments this year in one capacity or another; while another company’s Citrix guy might see one or two.  Experience matters.

Find out what experience the resources you are looking to employ have before you let them lay hands on your environment. Tools like Goliath Performance Monitor for XenApp and XenDesktop have the intelligence built-in to ultimately reduce support tickets using a combination of sophisticated alerts, remediation actions and alert resolution features.

If you would like to be featured as a guest author on our Proactive IT Operations blog, please send an email to: techinfo@goliathtechnologies.com

User Story: Citrix DaaS Provider Reduces Support Tickets

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User Story: Citrix DaaS Provider Reduces Support Tickets

In this brief post, I will discuss how specific functionality in our products helped our Citrix service provider partner avoid downtime and improve the economics of his business.

Headquartered near Dallas, XenWinGo, a Citrix Service Provider (CSP) provides customers completely hosted Citrix virtual desktops  that can be accessed by end users anywhere and from any device. XenWinGo’s DaaS service is sleek, streamlined, and simple.  All of the applications customers’ needs (email, office programs, financials, CRM, etc.) are bundled together into one platform that is hosted in a Citrix-based cloud environment.

A problem free Citrix end user experience is essential to retaining their impressive customer base and maintaining an efficient cost structure for delivering those services.  We have partnered with XenWinGo for over five years to help with both.

Mark Gigliotti, President of XenWinGo and its parent company USACI, recently told me that the proactive aspects of our software made it easier to meet their service level agreements and commitments to customers. In addition, he leverages other functionality to support the XenWinGo business model.

Proactive software functionality makes it easier to meet SLA’s

In a recent conversation, Mark explained that XenWinGo initially sought out Goliath back in 2010, because we were “the only true solution with preconfigured tools built to work with Citrix virtual desktops.  This means that we don’t have to write 150 to 200 lines of custom code, nor do we need consultants to configure the software to monitor our Citrix XenApp environments.”

Our development teams have spent countless man hours taking what we have learned about monitoring Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environments and transforming this knowledge into software functionality designed to provide an out of the box solution for Citrix. Literally, hundreds of monitors are automatically deployed to key points of the infrastructure that must be monitored because they are known failure points. In addition, the technology includes a self-healing capability or remediation actions that are critical in managing a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) business.

For XenWinGo customers, Goliath’s solutions have completely eliminated many previous issues from the customer’s line of vision.  For example, prior to working with Goliath, Mark noted that if one of the print drivers failed, it may not have been noticed by his team until a customer called in to complain about the problem and then the troubleshooting  would begin.

Since employing Goliath’s Proactive Performance Monitoring solution, Mark’s team is proactively notified of impending problems like the print manager issues or other problems such as apps exceeding CPU through alerts that are triggered using thresholds.  This allows the XenWinGo IT staff time to troubleshoot the problem before it impacts the customer. This ultimately reduces support tickets.

Supporting the Service Provider Business Model

Goliath’s technologies have improved XenWinGo’s business economics as well.  With the help of Goliath’s out of the box audit reports, XenWinGo can more accurately report monthly usage to their vendors such as Microsoft, Intuit and Citrix. These reports give detailed information on which users access applications and for what period of time. These reports, and others, can be created as XenWinGo branded reports for distribution to customers.

According to Mark, Goliath has helped XenWinGo to be proactive rather than reactive in managing their business.  “Goliath’s solutions have materially improved both the experience for our customers as well as our operating procedures and at the end of the day, this contributes to a better bottom line for XenWinGo.”

Grow your Service Provider Business with Goliath Technologies

Service providers were some of our earliest customers, so our technology has deep support for the virtual infrastructure including, both server and desktop. We have also taken into consideration the unique business challenges facing service providers and included functionality to support their business model. Many of our customers are providers of DaaS, MaaS, IaaS, RIM, Hosted Applications and Hosted Workspaces.

Please take a moment to learn more about how you can grow your business through Goliath’s Service Provider program.

About the Author: 

The team members collaborated to bring together this blog post by calling on their past Customer Experiences and Expert Knowledge of Citrix Troubleshooting. Beyond writing technical documents this team supports Goliath Customers and provides product feature and function guidance to development.