Windows 365 Cloud PC Launch

Windows 365 Cloud PC Launch

Goliath Technologies Announces Observability Support for Windows 365 Cloud PC 

 

Goliath joins Microsoft as an ISV partner in supporting customers as they increasingly adopt hybrid cloud environments with monitoring support for W365 Cloud PC 

 

PHILADELPHIA, March 12, 2024 — Goliath Technologies, a leader in end-user experience monitoring and troubleshooting software, today announced the general availability of W365 Cloud PC monitoring, further strengthening Goliath’s ISV partnership with Microsoft. By incorporating W365 Cloud PC monitoring into industry-leading Citrix and VMware Horizon monitoring and troubleshooting software, Goliath Performance Monitor further expands the ability of IT Support to monitor and troubleshoot end user experience in hybrid multi-cloud environments from a single platform. 

As new technologies like W365 Cloud PC are introduced to an organization’s tech stack, challenges for IT are multiplied. Managing a hybrid environment with multiple unaffiliated technologies generally requires multiple native monitoring tools which leads to manual correlation of data and a reliance on inference rather than facts to understand impact on end user experience. With W365 PC monitoring support, Goliath now provides performance and resource utilization, alerting, and reporting for your Cloud PC environment. By correlating W365 Cloud PC data into a single view with all other infrastructure and end user experience metrics, IT can seamlessly monitor and troubleshoot end user experience in a hybrid environment from a single platform without context switching between multiple monitoring solutions.   

“We continue to enable digital transformation by delivering observability data so that IT professionals can use contextual performance and end user experience metrics to proactively manage hybrid IT environments. Our products leverage AI and automation so that our customers will remark that our technology is like adding full-time employees to their staff who are dedicated to isolating and resolving end user experience issues,” says Thomas Charlton, CEO at Goliath Technologies. 

The latest version of Goliath Performance Monitor introduced an industry-first AI troubleshooting assistant known as KIP. The power of AI combined with embedded intelligence and automation now empowers IT generalists to draw from deep Citrix and Horizon knowledge and troubleshooting guidance earlier in the escalation path freeing up IT Admins and Architects to work on higher value strategic initiatives and ultimately take a proactive IT posture. 

“This is an excellent use of AI and is game-changing in the end user experience troubleshooting space. With KIP, Goliath’s AI persona, you get an extra Citrix expert in-house, always ready to help and assist you,” states Chris Twiest, Citrix Technical Professional   

Goliath has expanded their partnerships with Microsoft, Citrix, and Google as they continue to provide market-leading monitoring and troubleshooting solutions for an increasingly hybrid IT environment. With significant investment from all parties, Goliath will continue to bring capabilities to the marketplace designed with an ease of use and price profile unmatched across the industry. 

Windows 365 Cloud PC monitoring is now available.

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Troubleshooting Services: Improves Epic by Reducing Logon Times

Troubleshooting Services: Improves Epic by Reducing Logon Times

Top 5 Largest Non-Profit Health System

Top 5 Largest Non-Profit Health System Improves Epic Hyperdrive Speed and Reliability by reducing Citrix Logon Times by >50%

Top-5-Largest-Non-Profit-Health-System

“With Goliath, we were able to take corrective action to dramatically improve our clinicians experience around speed and reliability and Epic Hyperdrive.”

– Director of Citrix System Engineering Team, Non-profit Health System

Infrastructure

Epic Hyperdrive, Citrix

Challenge

The IT Incident Response Team was investigating multiple instances where end users were reporting slow logon performance when accessing Epic Hyperdrive via Citrix. In all cases, the account in use was a generic unassigned account presenting a challenge for the IT team in pinpointing the root cause of the Epic Hyperdrive speed & reliability issues.

While not initially apparent based on submitted support tickets, these issues were intermittent spanning 10 health systems, over 60 locations, and more than 37k users. There was significant impact to speed & reliability of Epic Hyperdrive and other clinical applications using Citrix to provide access.

Solution

The IT team leveraged Goliath’s AI-enhanced contextual data to help isolate the root cause of the logon issues, giving them the necessary information to permanently resolve the problem. Goliath was able to identify repeated Citrix and Epic Hyperdrive login failures followed by a successful, but relatively slow logon, for these accounts. Goliath also identified this was happening from multiple devices. Drilling into the failed sessions, it was immediately clear that the “profile load” stage of the Citrix logon was taking too long. Even with successful Citrix logons, the profile load time was extremely high.

 

Citrix logon

This health system uses local profiles on Epic Citrix servers, and this step in the logon process should be completed within 1-2 seconds. Looking at the Active Directory object for that account, they found a defined home folder path that should not be there. The identified path does not exist on the network and as a result, users were forced to wait for Windows to time-out the home drive connect action before eventually being logged into their workstation, or having their Citrix delivered applications connect.

As this path was a legacy carryover from a Google Drive migration, they opened a Priority 2 ticket and then implemented an emergency change to remove the path from the Active Directory object resolving the forced timeouts and long logon times.

Additionally, this problem had been previously reported by users; however, lacking the necessary data, the team was unable to identify the root cause and put permanent fixes in place.

Results

Since the time they implemented the change, they’ve seen the logon times for that account reduced by 50% or more.

 

Logon

While the reported issue was now permanently resolved, the IT team got proactive and leveraged Goliath’s AI-enhanced contextual data and Citrix Fault Isolation reporting to identify all users who were experiencing Epic Hyperdrive speed & reliability issues. It was immediately apparent that the original issue, while not widely reported, was in fact a widespread problem.

They immediately kicked off an initiative to identify and resolve user path issues. In addition, they configured Goliath to alert on Citrix and Epic Hyperdrive logons that extend beyond an acceptable threshold allowing them to resolve speed & reliability issues before end users are impacted.

In the end, they were able to reduce Epic Hyperdrive logon times by more than 50% across 37k users.

*Epic, Hyperspace, Hyperdrive, and System Pulse are trademarks of Epic Systems Corporation

Cadaceus Medical Symbol

ABOUT ORGANIZATION

This non-profit healthcare organization is one of the largest in the country. It operates an extensive network of medical facilities across the United States, providing a wide range of healthcare services to diverse communities. With a strong commitment to compassionate care and community well-being, this organization plays a vital role in the nation’s healthcare landscape.

Headquarters location: USA (Midwest)
Hospital Locations: >150
Employees: >150,000
Industry: Healthcare

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NorthBay Health Ensures Cerner & Citrix are Always Available

NorthBay Health Ensures Cerner & Citrix are Always Available

NorthBay Health

Goliath Services Team Prevents Cerner & Citrix Performance Issues from Impacting Clinicians

User Story Banner

Chris Timbers“Goliath Technologies’ gives us complete visibility into the end-user experience from the time they logon to Cerner through their use of the application, in real-time, so we stay ahead of performance issues that can impact our users.” – Chris Timbers, CIO at NorthBay Healthcare 

Infrastructure

Cerner Millennium, Citrix

Challenge

This story speaks to unique challenges that NorthBay faced and how the Goliath Troubleshooting Services team was able to apply technology and expertise to resolve Cerner Millennium or Citrix logon issues before physicians or clinicians were impacted.

IT Challenges with Cerner Millennium & Citrix that Impact Patient Care

NorthBay IT was faced with the following daily challenges:

Slow logons for Cerner and Citrix: Physicians log on from different locations throughout the hospital and see patients every 20 minutes, so a two-minute delay when trying to access Cerner is too long to wait. Speed of access to these applications is critical to ensuring that time is spent providing healthcare service and not waiting for application sessions to launch.

Delayed identification of Cerner or Citrix performance degradation: Degraded session performance severely impacts the timely delivery of patient care. As a result, it is critical that performance “slowdowns” are identifiedearly, before the ability to deliver services is impacted [Learn more about Goliath Performance Monitor for Hospitals Using Cerner].

Complexity of the Cerner and Citrix Logon Process:The Cerner and Citrix logon process is the primary step to accessing mission-critical applications. It is complex and relies on many components to successfully complete the logon process, making it difficult to troubleshoot without purpose-built technology.

Lack of Visibility: NorthBay healthcare providers primarily utilize the Cerner application via Citrix. This application is hosted by Cerner. NorthBay had visibility into their own infrastructure while Cerner actively monitored application performance in the data center. However, there was no effective end-to-end performance monitoring from the data center to the desktop.

Solution

Goliath Troubleshooting Services 

After an exhaustive search to identify a solution for NorthBay’s unique visibility challenges, their team elected to deploy Goliath Performance Monitor and Goliath Application Availability Monitor with out-of-the-box functionality to support Citrix and Cerner.

Implementing Goliath Performance Monitor in just the NorthBay environment was not going to be sufficient in providing the end-to-end visibility that they required. However, because Goliath is the only monitoring technology allowed in the Cerner hosted facility, we were able to provide an industry-only fully integrated solution that encompasses their entire application delivery architecture. Goliath Performance Monitor offered the following capabilities to the administrators and support staff at NorthBay: 

  • End-to-end visibility that enables them to have performance and availability metrics from the end-users’ perspective at the hospital location. This data can be trended in real-time and historically.
  • Visibility into both on-premise and Cerner-hosted applications and servers.
Cerner session display

Results

Once the product was deployed, NorthBay system administrators had true end-to-end visibility with comprehensive monitoring of both Cerner Millennium and Citrix. They received an in-depth view into the entire user workflow, regardless of location. Goliath’s Cerner and Citrix monitoring capabilities, combined with Cerner’s remote hosting technologies and services, provide NorthBay with advanced warning of potential end-user experience issues and evidence of root cause to resolve and prevent future issues. 

To increase visibility across the network, NorthBay also wanted to guarantee that clinical applications would launch when physicians and healthcare workers attempted to log on. Healthcare workers see patients about every 20 minutes, so the applications needed to launch immediately to avoid scheduling delays. Goliath Application Availability Monitor was deployed to proactively log on to applications and alert IT administrators of logon failures or slowness before end users were impacted.

 

Cerner GAAM Screen

The advantage of having the Goliath solution deployed on-premises, where clinical applications are hosted, is that NorthBay now has complete end-to-end visibility that previously could not have been accomplished. In addition, NorthBay can complement the quality monitoring and management that CernerWorks provides in the hosted facility with their own on-site end-user experience monitoring and management. 

NorthBay Health logo

ABOUT NORTHBAY HEALTH

NorthBay Health is a non-profit healthcare system in Northern California. NorthBay Health is dedicated to providing quality healthcare services to the local communities it serves, with a focus on community health and wellness. They are committed to delivering the highest level of care possible and rely upon Cerner and Citrix to support this objective throughout their health system.

Headquarters location: Fairfield, California
Founded: 1960
Employees: >2500
Industry: Healthcare

Troubleshooting Services UHS

Troubleshooting Services UHS

Universal Health Services, Inc.

Resolves a Patient Application Issue in Hours not Days or Weeks

Universal Health Services, Inc. Resolves a Patient Application Issue in Minutes Not Hours

Justin Monnig“We received an urgent request from a Chief Nursing Officer at one of our hospitals. She reported that nursing staff were not receiving important patient information from a staffing application. The application vendor couldn’t pinpoint root cause. We called Goliath and within 3 hours the UHS internal IT team and Goliath Professional Services were able to resolve the issue.”— Justin Monnig, General Manager of Crossings Healthcare Solutions, a subsidiary of Universal Health Services, Inc.

Infrastructure

Oracle Health & Cerner Millennium 

Challenge

User Accounts Mysteriously Disappearing

Universal Health Services, Inc. (UHS) was experiencing user accounts in the nursing staffing application mysteriously disappearing from groups, impacting the ability for the appropriate staff to receive important messages. It was both troubling and puzzling for the IT team. Below are the action steps the IT team and Goliath Troubleshooting Services Team took to troubleshoot the user account problem and prevent the failure to deliver healthcare services from recurring in the future. 

Solution

Finding the Root Cause in Hours– Not Days

This issue was affecting the delivery of patient care, and finding a resolution was time critical. Unfortunately, the vendor support channel for diagnosing and resolving this issue was proving to be ineffective. The ticket was escalated to the application vendor and the UHS team awaited a response. Simultaneously, however, they also engaged Goliath Troubleshooting Services and their internal Citrix monitoring, escalation & engineering team to see if they could resolve it more quickly. 

“I contacted Goliath since I knew Goliath Troubleshooting Services would be able to help from past experience with their team. They wrote a quick SQL query to gather application process information and set up proactive alerting as well as an additional report to provide the needed information. These findings were sent to the hospital and they were able to use the information to prove that this was an end user issue and not a result of the application. So we were able to troubleshoot, identify the root cause and resolve the issue in less than 3 hours from first call to final resolution. All this before we heard from the application provider.” 

KPI Cerner Screenshot

The image above displays metrics from a single user session which helps quickly identify if the root cause of slow performance is isolated to a single user due to behavior or if it is a larger systematic issue related to the underlying infrastructure (Citrix) or application. In this example, it identifies that a slow connection speed (potentially from home WiFi) was causing the end user performance issues, not the application itself. 

Results

By leveraging Goliath’s Troubleshooting Services Team, the team at UHS solved a mission-critical issue that could have impacted patient care.  

Now, UHS has proactive monitoring and alerting set for this specific condition so that, if it ever happens again at other hospitals, they will be alerted in real-time. 

UHS currently has Goliath Citrix Monitoring technology deployed throughout their entire Citrix application delivery infrastructure, which they use to deliver Cerner Millennium™ to their hospitals. The scope of their deployment includes agents deployed within the Cerner-hosted datacenter, and the Goliath Application Availability Monitor at over 33 acute care hospital facilities across the United States. The technology is used by UHS for Citrix monitoring to anticipate, troubleshoot, resolve and, most importantly, prevent issues with accessing Cerner Millennium™ from impacting users’ ability to deliver healthcare services. 

UHS logo

ABOUT UHS

Universal Health Services (UHS) is a major healthcare management company in the United States. It operates hospitals, behavioral health facilities, and ambulatory care centers across the country. UHS offers a wide range of medical services, from general healthcare to specialized treatments. Its mission is to provide quality healthcare services to communities, though it is a for-profit entity in the private healthcare sector.

Headquarters location: King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Founded: 1979
Employees: >94 000
Industry: Healthcare