“We reduced Citrix ticket escalations by 60%”
– Pete Chim, Systems Engineer
The Challenge:
Ballard Spahr is a national law firm that has attorneys and staff attempting to access applications from all over the world. Because they use various methods to connect to the internet, the connection quality is variable and Citrix Monitoring is essential. The firm has users connecting from remote offices, homes, hotels, and even airplanes, which can result in connection and latency issues. This leads to an increase in the number of end users contacting the help desk for advice on improving the quality of service, even when the cause was a low-quality hotel or airline network.
The majority of these Citrix tickets were escalated to the Citrix Escalation Team, who are responsible for Citrix Monitoring, because the help desk, despite their best efforts, didn’t have the Citrix Monitoring tools or the knowledge to troubleshoot and resolve the problem. In addition, they did not have the objective evidence in the form of reports or documentation to demonstrate the root cause of the problem to those end users.
The Solution:
The IT team needed a Citrix Monitoring solution that would allow them to do two things:
- Offer them granular visibility into network connection and Citrix latency
- Provide the help desk with comprehensive Citrix Monitoring so they would have the ability to troubleshoot and potentially resolve end user experience issues. And, if the issue could not be resolved because it was solely related to the connection, provide a way to document this for the end users.
As a Citrix Platinum customer, Ballard Spahr did have Citrix Insight Center and Citrix Director deployed in their Citrix XenApp environment. As with most free utilities, these are designed to provide some metrics, but don’t offer the broad and deep visibility necessary to anticipate, troubleshoot, resolve and prevent Citrix end user experience issues. Citrix Director, beyond being inadequate from a Citrix monitoring and troubleshooting perspective, was too confusing to be useful to the help desk staff.
After looking at several Citrix Monitoring vendors, the firm decided to do a proof of concept with Goliath Technologies. They discovered that Goliath gave—in real time—very deep and complete visibility into the Citrix end user experience. Of particular value was its ability to quickly identify the root cause of a remote user’s issue—whether it is the connection, stage of the logon sequence or another program competing for network resources, such as YouTube, Netflix or ESPN.com, which is causing the latency. With Goliath’s Citrix Monitoring they can see, in real time, if a user’s slow connection is due to internet network quality or a competing program.
Summary:
Armed with the right Citrix Monitoring and troubleshooting technology, the IT team was poised to integrate it into their internal processes so they could improve the end user experience through faster response times, improved communication, and an empowered help desk. Pete Chim, Systems Engineer at Ballard Spahr, put a checklist in their ServiceNow knowledge base. He also trained the help desk staff to use Goliath’s Citrix Monitoring and Troubleshooting to conduct a series of checks against this knowledge base when a ticket was opened from an end user complaining about Citrix connection or latency issues. Now, the help desk staff can resolve issues more easily on their own, which has reduced the need to escalate to Citrix engineers by an estimated 60%. And Pete is still looking for ways to increase that figure.
