“We wanted to add a proactive, automated, cloud-based monitoring service to our current portfolio of Microsoft Azure cloud solutions. Our objective was to provide our customers with the capability to confirm that Citrix delivered applications will launch, reliably, every day, before end users even get to work, and if they don’t, send us an alert so we can fix it before users are impacted. Our decision to partner with Goliath Technologies was based on their unique ability to provide technology that supports all the areas of the service and they fully understand the business of managed service providers, so we have great confidence in their ability to support us long term.”
– Steve Weiss, President and COO at Accelera Solutions


The Organization:  Accelera Solutions, Managed Service Provider

The Organization’s Infrastructure:  Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft Azure

The Organization’s Performance Monitoring Products: Goliath Logon Simulator for Application Availability Service

The Business Challenge: Azure Hosted Desktop Availability

Accelera Solutions is one of the premiere managed services providers in existence today who use Microsoft Azure as a hosting provider. Remote infrastructure services, RMM and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) delivery are the main services they offer. One of the key challenges for Accelera has been providing Citrix application and desktop availability assurance for their Azure hosted Citrix delivered applications and desktops. The desire was to deliver a solution to their clients that would provide them with advance warning before Citrix application and/or Citrix desktop availability issues occurred. So something with preemptive alerting so they know before their users know. Advance warning of Citrix logon issues would give them time to remediate the issue before users are impacted.

The key criteria for consideration was a solution that could exercise every aspect of the logon process in concert to validate that infrastructure components are available and deliver the application successfully; even the infrastructure elements in Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, the solution required enterprise features and had to be able to scale in order support their expansive customer base.

The Solution

Goliath Technologies was selected by Accelera to deliver Citrix application availability services to their customers. This selection was made because of the unique, industry-first capabilities that only Goliath could enable Accelera to provide. These capabilities are listed below:

  • True Citrix Delivery Infrastructure Validation – Confirms that the entire Citrix delivery infrastructure will work at the time of access. This includes NetScaler, Storefront, Delivery Controller, XenDesktop, XenApp, Active Directory, and Virtual Server Infrastructure.
  • Real-Time Alerting – Advance warning alerts to application failure or logon/launch slowness.
  • Reporting – On-demand or scheduled historical analysis of launch success and failures.
  • Dashboard – Real-time view of logon tests and successful/failure validation

The Accelera service does not require software in the customer’s data center and is fully delivered from the Azure. Every day, three hours before users arrive at work, Goliath automatically executes a Citrix logon and launch validation to make certain the Citrix delivery infrastructure is up and available. The service allows for the testing of customer published applications and/or virtual desktops on a scheduled basis, regardless of the customer location, as seen in the image below.